My motivation for writing this booklet is JD Vance becoming Donald Trump’s vice president. JD Vance wrote Hillbilly Elegy and claims to be a voice for rural and small-town America. I’m American on my mother’s side, and in that maternal lineage, I am the 6th generation to grow up in rural/small-town America. I cannot stay silent.
One of the biggest problems with JD Vance and his Hillbilly Elegy is that it plays into many of the worst right-wing attitudes about poverty. Ultimately, Vance’s take reinforces the idea that poverty is a character flaw and the poor are personally responsible for causing, and solving, their own suffering.
The right wing tends to avoid speaking about poverty at all. To the right wing, white poor people are a shameful scourge best kept invisible, a betrayal to both white supremacy and capitalism, and a threat to be neutralized at all costs. Insofar as the right wing speaks of poverty, it is largely to blame poor people of color for all of society’s ills and attempt wholesale character assassination at every turn. In essence, JD Vance just breaks the right wing silence on white poverty by applying this same approach of individual blame to poor white people and implying that the solution is for the poor to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
I’m used to the right wing treating all poor people like a stain on the nation - to be covered up or scourged.
I’m used to the liberal elite looking at the poor of rural America with smugness and disdain. “They deserve what they get because they’re all a bunch of crazy Trump voters.”
I’m used to urban working class and poor people of color thinking about rural America with some combination of wariness and distrust that I deeply respect but also mythologies that I believe are worth unpacking.
In this booklet I have something to say to all three of these groups.
To JD Vance and his ilk: This was done to us on purpose
To the Liberal Elite: Stop scapegoating the poor
To urban working class and poor people of color: The house is on fire
Group #1 - To JD Vance and his ilk:
This was done to us on purpose.
Rural and small town America is a “sacrifice zone” and you know it. You know full well that so many of America’s worst sins are hidden away in its remote areas. And you know full well that all of this has been done on purpose. More than that - you know full well who is to blame.
Rural America is witness to this country’s original sins: dispossessing Indigenous people of their land, hiding subsequent reservations in remote rural areas, and denying reparations to formerly enslaved Black people after the Civil War - the broken promise of “40 acres and a mule.” Consider the following words from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Reparations Fund, 2024):
At the very same time that America refused to give the Negro any land, through an act of Congress our government was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest, which meant that it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor. But not only did they give the land, they built land grant colleges with government money to teach them how to farm. Not only that, they provided county agents to further their expertise in farming. Not only that, they provided low interest rates in order that they could mechanize their farms. Not only that, today many of these people today are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies NOT to farm, and they are the very people telling the Black man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. This is what we are faced with. And this is the reality now. When we come to Washington, in this campaign, we are coming to get our check.
All of what Dr. King describes is true. However, Dr. King did not live long enough to see what happened after the 1960s.
During the farm crises of the 1970s and 80s many families lost their farms to foreclosure, and much of this land then passed into the hands of ever-growing corporate agriculture (Bennett, 2022). The fuel crisis of the 70s, Cold War-era subsidies resulting in low crop prices, high interest rates, and tight credit all battered rural communities (Bennett, 2022; Green, 1985). By 1977, American farmers had lost $13 billion in revenue, and many could no longer cover the costs of their operation let alone make a profit (Bennett, 2022). Debt skyrocketed and then the foreclosures came. My mother’s family in Nebraska was no exception.
My mother’s father is friends with one of the farmers in Brownville, NE who helped organize Tractorcade, a national effort by 5,000 farmers who drove their tractors to Washington DC in 1979 to protest conditions in rural America. The protesters were beaten, tear-gassed, and arrested, but some farmers still stayed afterwards to replant the sod on the Mall that had been torn up by the tractors (Bennett, 2022). In response to the protest, the Carter administration promised to stop farm foreclosures, but soon after the protestors left, the Home Administration resumed foreclosures on farms with past-due loans (Bennett, 2022).
Photo from AAM protest in the late 1970s, photo courtesy of AgWeb
The protest was associated with the American Agriculture Movement, an attempt to organize farmers into strikes and other forms of collective bargaining under the slogan “Parity not Charity” (Bennett, 2022). The USDA estimates that approximately 1.5 million farmers were involved with the AAM during its peak activity in the 70s and 80s (Bennett, 2022). The collective organizing did not stop with the Carter administration and continued into the Reagan administration, with one of the largest protests of farmers in U.S. history occurring in Ames, Iowa in 1985, with over 15,000 farmers gathered (Green, 1985). Unfortunately, none of these efforts were able to stop what came next for rural America.
When Dr. King made the speech cited above, the overwhelming majority of agricultural land was still held by individual white families. By 1990 that number had decreased, with small and medium-sized farms accounting for nearly half of all agricultural production in the U.S. (McGreal, 2019). As of 2022 it is only 18.7% (McGreal, 2019).
As of the 2022 Census of Agriculture, 75% of all farmland in the U.S. is owned by the largest 9% of operations, with the largest 2% controlling 42% of all farmland (USDA, 2024). Nationally, the average family farm is less than 500 acres (Shabandeh, 2024). The average size of the 9% of farms that own 75% of farmland was over 1,000 acres, with the top 2% averaging above 5,000 acres (Census of Agriculture, 2024). The total number of farms in the U.S. has dropped from roughly 2 million in 2016 to 1.8 million in 2022 while the average farm size has steadily increased (National Agricultural Statistics Service, 2024).
Images: USDA Economic Research Service & 2022 Farm Census
A person might reasonably ask - just because the land ownership is different, does that actually mean that people are suffering? And if so, how?
Put simply, corporate consolidation in the agriculture industry has destroyed many people’s ability to live dignified lives. The loss of family farms causes ripple effects in local economies as well as the very social fabric of rural communities (Heaberlin & Shattuck, 2023). Wealth becoming increasingly consolidated and extracted away from local economies has a compounding impact, such as decreasing the tax base to fund schools, which fuels further depopulation and job losses in education, health care, and small business, all threatening the viability of life in rural areas (Heaberlin & Shattuck, 2023). The “hollowing out” of rural America has caused far too many rural areas and small towns to become “abandoned, economically shattered places, with growing social and health problems” (Edelmen, 2019). While social ties are often a source of resilience in rural areas and small towns, large-scale economic forces often damage the social fabric of communities beyond any easy repair as well.
It’s not just the loss of family farms that has deeply scarred rural communities, it is also changes in agriculture-related industries like meatpacking. These were once jobs that, while difficult, provided a decent living to many small towns and rural communities. Most of those jobs no longer look anything like they used to and have been replaced with poverty wages and questionable labor practices. The book Methland provides one example of a man named Roland Jarvis from Oelwein, Iowa (Reding, 2010, pg. 50-51):
In 1992, Iowa Ham, a small, old canning and packaging company, was bought by Gillette. Overnight, the union was dismantled, and the wages fell from $18 an hour to $6.20. For Jarvis, who now had the first of his four children, it became more important than ever to work harder and longer in order to make ends meet. His meth habit increased along with the purity of the dope. And then one day he did the math…He was making $50 every eight hours to do a job in which there was a 36% rate of injury, thereby making meatpacking the most dangerous vocation in the country. For this, Jarvis, now that he worked for Gillette, got no medical coverage for himself or his children, no promise of workers’ compensation should he be hurt, and no hope of advancement. With Iowa Ham, every employee had not only gotten benefits; they’d owned stock in the company.
Roland Jarvis is just one of many rural people who faced these realities in the late 20th century. Keep in mind that these farm crises occurred largely at the same time as much of the industrial core of the North began to bottom out as well, forming what we now call the “Rust Belt.” Happening at the exact same time was the slow, painful death of the coal industry in Appalachia.
In the decades following the Civil War, the burgeoning coal industry in Appalachia heavily recruited recently freed Black people, poor white sharecroppers already in Appalachia, and new European migrants, resulting in one of the first racially- integrated - but deeply exploited - workforces in the U.S. (Hill, 2021). These companies offered equal wages to both Black and white people, albeit extremely low wages, and there was no land ownership involved, as nearly all wage workers lived in “company towns” during the coal boom (Hill, 2021). The 20th century Coal Wars involved multiracial resistance to deadly working conditions, poverty wages, corporate control of every aspect of life in “company towns,” and attempts to squash unionization (Sonnie & Tracy, 2011).
Many people know about the assassinations of Black leaders such as Dr. King, Fred Hampton, and Malcolm X in the late 1960s, as well as the role of the federal government in their deaths (Haas, 2011). Although less well-known, poor white organizers working in multiracial movements in rural areas such as Appalachia often met the same fate, though more often at the hands of company-hired “gun thugs,” local police, or the Klan, rather than the FBI (Sonnie & Tracy, 2011). Someone needs to print me a T-shirt that says: “They don’t need COINTELPRO if they get a corporation to do it for them.” The names of assassinated poor white organizers bear repeating as well - Joe Hill (d. 1915), Frank Little (d. 1917), Sid Hatfield (d. 1921), Harry Simms (d. 1932), Roving Picket strikers (d. 1959), John Howard (d. 1969), Lawrence Jones (d. 1973), Raymond Tackett (d. 1973), Karen Silkwood (d. 1974), James Waller (d. 1979), and many others.
A miner in Brookside, Kentucky shows where gun thugs fired into his cabin, 1973
Still image taken from Harlan County U.S.A. documentary (Kopple, 1976)
People in Appalachia grew accustomed to stacking their mattresses up against the walls of their cabins at night and sleeping together on the floor - a thin layer of protection for when the “gun thugs” would come at night and fire machine guns into their homes (Hill, 2021). It became a nightly ritual when tensions were bad with the mining companies (Kopple, 1976).
The well-known protest song “Which Side Are You On?” was written in 1931 by a woman named Florence Reece, a coal miner’s wife in eastern Kentucky, after company thugs burst into her house during the night searching for her husband who’d been involved in recent strikes (Kopple, 1976). Reece scribbled the lyrics on the back of a calendar:
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
Don’t scab for the bosses
Don’t listen to their lies
Us poor folks haven’t got a chance
Unless we organize
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on?
Reece and her family lived through a period called Bloody Harlan, a series of executions, bombings, and strikes in Harlan County, Kentucky during the Coal Wars. Reece is also featured in Harlan County U.S.A., a documentary from 1976 that covered the deadly 1973 Brookside Miners Strike against Duke Power Company in southeastern Kentucky, and one of the best pieces of media I could recommend to anyone who wishes to better understand Appalachia and the Coal Wars.
By the end of the 1960s, over 7 million white people who had been born in the South had migrated to Northern urban areas, a mass internal migration of largely impoverished, rural white people that is rarely discussed in U.S. history (Sonnie & Tracy, 2011). (Compare, for example, the 8 million people who have fled Venezuela since 2019, considered a major international displacement). It was young white Appalachians fleeing the violence and poverty of the Coal Wars who migrated to Chicago and became the primary white presence in the Black Panther-led Rainbow Coalition in the 1960s (Sonnie & Tracy, 2011). The Rainbow Coalition attempted to organize poor and working class neighborhoods of all races in Chicago. Whether in Chicago or in Appalachia, government and corporate actors killed many people in the effort to kill these multiracial movements for grassroots power. The Chicago Rainbow Coalition lost a number of members to assassination, including Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark who were killed in 1969, and white Appalachians John Howard and Raymond Tackett who were killed in 1969 and 1973, respectively. (One of the best sources I have found on this unique history is the 2011 book Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power by Annie Sonnie and James Tracy.)
Rainbow Coalition members including Fred Hampton (far right) attend a rally at Grant Park in Chicago, 1969 (Photo by Paul Sequiera/Getty Images)
A variety of urban and rural communities experienced economic and political sabotage during the 20th century and many have never recovered. For displaced farmers and agricultural workers, for Rust Belt workers whose industries vanished, and for Appalachians in dying coal country, there was no guarantee of finding another “blue collar” career and simply being absorbed into a different workforce as the 20th century drew to a close. And as a result, a lot of bad things happened next.
The rise of meth in rural and small town America is intimately tied to its economic crises. The best source I can recommend on this subject is the book Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town by Nick Reding. As rural/small town residents lost the economic footing they once had from family farms, union jobs, or coal mining, many of these workers began relying on meth to work longer and longer hours for less and less pay. As Methland comments about Lori Arnold, one of the dealers who helped built a meth empire in the Midwest: “In 1987, the year that Cargill cut wages at its Ottumwa meatpacking plant from $18/hour to $6.50/hour with no benefits, Lori Arnold sold a pound of pure, uncut crank for $32,000” (pg. 69). I highly recommend reading Methland, as it is the most comprehensive source I have found to date. But, the broad sweep of the meth story is as follows:
* Meth was invented as a pharmaceutical by a Japanese physician in 1898 (Reding, 2010).
* Meth was used extensively by all sides during WWII (Reding, 2010).
* Meth was legally prescribed in the U.S. through the 1970s and became especially popular amongst agricultural workers (Reding, 2010 & Garriott, 2024).
* Meth was made illegal and people who were hooked started making their own in home meth labs. Some biker gangs got involved but it was mostly small-time dealing. This meth is called “P2P” meth (Quinones, 2021).
* Organized crime caught wind and wanted “in,” including Mexican cartels. Production ramped up considerably in the 90s and early 2000s. Most of this meth from “superlabs” was ephedrine meth, a different variety than the P2P kind found in home labs. For the first time in history, large swaths of rural America were labeled “High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas” (Garriott, 2024).
* Corporate interests lobbying against any attempt to regulate pseudoephedrine + the War on Drugs approach of incarceration rather than treatment made everything worse (Reding, 2010 & Quinones, 2021).
* Rural communities were already reeling from meth by the time opioids ramped up (Garriott, 2024).
* Meth looked like it was receding but since 2013 has rebounded with a vengeance, in no small part due to superlabs figuring out how to make an extra potent and refined version of P2P meth that has taken the nation by storm (Quinones, 2021). An unintended consequence of marijuana legalization in much of the U.S. was that many Mexican marijuana growers switched to producing this new concentrated P2P meth (Quinones, 2021). The rate of meth use is now at an all-time national high (Garriott, 2024).
* In recent years many more people are suffering from both meth and opioid addictions at the same time and more and more meth is laced with fentanyl (Quinones, 2021).
That’s the quick and dirty overview. For communities living through this, the up-close-and-personal details are even more painful. Sam Quinones, a journalist and author who has written frequently about meth over the past decade (including two books), wrote in a 2021 article in The Atlantic: “You don’t typically overdose and die on meth; you decay.” The gradual decay from meth is devastating and contributes significantly to homelessness and incarceration in rural communities. And the severity of damage is only increasing. Home-made P2P meth and lab-made ephedrine meth tended to damage people gradually, over years. With the switchover to this new P2P meth from cartel superlabs, that damage seemed to accelerate, especially damage to the brain. “Methamphetamine damages the brain no matter how it is derived. But [new] P2P meth seems to create a higher order of cerebral catastrophe” (Quinones, 2021).
James Mahoney is a neuropsychologist at West Virginia University who has studied the effects of meth on the brain since the early 2000s. The psychosis he saw from ephedrine meth was bad, but frequently appeared to be the result of extended sleep deprivation, and people in recovery tended to heal completely from psychotic symptoms (much like crack, apparently). However, with new P2P meth, Mahoney says, “Now we’re seeing it instantaneously, within hours, in people who just used: psychotic symptoms, hallucinations, delusions,” and more and more people never recover from psychotic symptoms even when they have successfully ceased to use meth (Quinones, 2021). Quitting meth is a tall order in and of itself, as no medication-assisted therapies are available, such as methadone or Suboxone for opioid use (Quinones, 2021).
Nick Reding captured a private thought of many rural Americans when he interviewed the mayor of Oelwein, Iowa about the impact of meth on his community. As the mayor said, “My fear is that there is no solution” (Reding, 2010, pg. 31).
For rural communities the various waves of meth and opioids have been particularly devastating. Opioids made their way into rural and small town communities in two ways. The first was as prescribed opioids, and given that occupations like farming and meatpacking carry high risk of injury with little coverage for more holistic healthcare, there was no shortage of patients who needed inexpensive “solutions” for their pain. Additionally, organized crime began to pump opioids into the same distribution networks they had already built in rural America for meth.
Nationally, the opioid crisis is the worst that it has ever been, largely due to the rise of fentanyl (Praun, 2023). Between 2018-2023 the rate of overdoses has grown more than 60%, and 105,000 Americans died of overdoses in 2022 alone (Praun, 2023).
The result of these spiraling and compounding crises has been a series of negative outcomes for rural and small town America:
* Population loss - Metropolitan areas make up 36% of all counties but accounted for 99% of population growth and job growth from 2008 to 2017 (Swenson, 2019). During this same period, 71% of metropolitan counties grew in population, whereas over half of small-town and rural counties did not grow or shrank (Swenson, 2019).
* Rural blight - Due to population and economic loss, rural and small town areas are often resource-starved and struggle to maintain public transportation, public works, housing, commercial bases, and education, leading to blight (Swenson, 2019).
* Substance use and overdoses - Rates of substance use overall are similar between urban and rural settings but severity of outcomes is different. For example, while rates of using any substance (including alcohol and marijuana) are roughly equal between urban and rural youth, rural youth are 35x more likely to use opioids than their urban counterparts (Rural Policy Research Institute, 2019). Additionally, alcohol-related deaths and overdose rates have been higher in rural settings than urban ones for over a decade (Rural Policy Research Institute, 2019).
* Suicides - Rates of completed suicide are 55% higher in rural settings than in urban ones, largely due to limited access to mental health services, high levels of substance use, higher access to firearms, reduced access to timely emergency services, and higher suicide rates in populations of veterans, Indigenous people, and men in general (Rural Policy Research Institute, 2019).
* Poor health outcomes and early death - Rural areas experience higher rates of chronic disease, lower access to healthy food, lowered life expectancies, worse maternal and infant health outcomes, and lack of access to healthcare services (Rural Health Information Hub, 2019). Additionally, it is primarily rural, conservative states whose state legislatures refused to expand Medicaid access after the Affordable Care Act (Barber, 2024). Just as one example, my home state of Indiana consistently ranks within the bottom 10 of all 50 states in most health outcomes and was one such state to reject the expansion of Medicaid (Indiana Department of Health, 2022).
* Social and political abandonment - The proliferation of rural sacrifice zones has not been accompanied by broader political or societal attempts to provide for the wellbeing of communities undergoing massive economic restructuring (Heaberlin & Shattuck, 2023). Many rural/small town residents struggle with feelings that they are intentionally forgotten and left-behind people of the world, that “nobody cares,” and that there is “no hope” for reviving a place they may have once known as vibrant.
* Violence and crime - The average murder rate is 40% higher in the 25 states that voted for Trump compared to those that voted for Biden (Murdock & Kessler, 2022). Most of the states in the top ten for per capita murder rate are largely conservative and rural. This is contrary to the dominant media narrative that Democratic-run states are “ground zero” of violent crime.
Image courtesy of Red State Murder Problem
* Mass incarceration - Across the board, more rural and more conservative states have significantly higher rates of incarceration than their urban and liberal counterparts. Incarceration has largely been the catch-all societal answer to compounding issues of drugs, poverty, violence, lack of opportunity, lack of resources, homelessness, and the social fabric unraveling throughout rural and small town America. This is just a sampling, but consider the rates of incarceration per 100,000 population in the following states (Widra, 2024):
Louisiana - 1067 Nebraska - 591
Kentucky - 889 California - 494
Tennessee - 817 Illinois - 433
Texas - 751 New York - 317
Indiana - 721 New Jersey - 270
A person might reasonably ask, if rural and small town America are suffering so much, then who are all these factory farms, meatpacking plants, and agribusiness employing these days? By and large, it is less and less U.S.-born laborers. It is more and more migrant laborers, the majority of whom come from Latin America. Against the backdrop of corporate consolidation, slashed wages and benefits, and NAFTA, the labor force in rural America began to drastically change in composition in the 21st century.
According to a New York Times article published in 2001, a government study found that 40% of agricultural workers in the U.S. were here illegally, and 25% of all meatpacking workers were here illegally (Reding, 2010, pg. 150). Also in 2001, a CBS news report found that 80% of workers at a Cargill plant in Schuyler, Nebraska were from Latin America and 40% were here illegally. Wages were pegged at $5 an hour (Reding, 2010, pg. 151).
The practice soon became rubber-stamped after a series of court cases failed to hold corporations accountable in any way other than “slap on the wrist” fines. Both corporate and governmental leadership agreed to simply look the other way. Methland describes one such seminal case in 2001 (Reding, 2010, pg. 153):
A failed 2001 federal criminal case brought against a Tyson plant in Shelbyville, Tennessee, made clear that corporations would essentially not be held liable for employing or recruiting illegal immigrants to work in the plants. Despite the fact that two Shelbyville managers were caught on tape by federal investigators asking human traffickers for five hundred undocumented workers over four months, Tyson’s defense team successfully maintained that it’s too difficult for Tyson employees to determine who’s who among the legal and illegal employees. The ruling institutionalized the notion that employers of immigrants are not beholden to offering the same rights to workers that other companies must, for the simple reason that they don’t know - and don’t need to know - who works for them.
Two decades later, the pattern has only become more entrenched. As University of Missouri sociologist William Heffernan says, “Cracking down on illegal immigration would cripple the food production system” (Reding, 2010, pg. 159). Human rights abuses are rampant, from human trafficking to wage theft (National Center for Farmworker Health, 2020). But lest we be tempted to think that only undocumented people face such abuses, let us remember: people can be in the country legally and still be exploited. It happens all the time.
For example, the U.S. is seeing an upsurge in child labor, particularly amongst children who are asylum-seekers. Under federal law, these children have every legal right to pursue their asylum cases, but child labor statutes still prohibit companies from hiring them.
NBC News recently conducted a year-long investigation about child labor in American slaughterhouses (Strickler, Ainsley & Martinez, 2023). The report found pervasive hiring of children as young as 14. The U.S. Department of Labor estimated in 2023 that around 6,000 children were employed in slaughterhouses throughout the country, but the number is likely higher, especially given that 250,000 unaccompanied migrant children have arrived in the U.S. seeking asylum during 2021 and 2022 alone (Dreier, 2023). NBC News found that the number of children being illegally employed in the U.S. has increased by 88% since 2019. Many of the children employed in slaughterhouses work night shifts between school days. One child laborer described to NBC News that she can make $100 in a single day compared with $1 a day in Guatemala, and she is sending as much of the money home as she can.
A series of deaths of children (such as Duvan Pérez at Mar-Jac in Mississippi) have recently garnered media attention to the issue. The NBC report notes that the maximum federal fine for hiring a child is $15,138 per instance. In an interview with NBC, a lawyer representing Mar-Jac commented, “The publicity is far worse than the penalty.” Tyson Foods, Perdue Farms, Mar-Jac, Hearthside Foods, Gerber’s Poultry, Win.It America, and others in the industry are all currently under federal investigation for child labor violations. At the same time, lawmakers in Republican-controlled states have recently introduced a slew of laws to scale back or repeal child labor laws (1A Podcast, 2023). The Labor Department tracks the deaths of foreign-born child laborers but stopped making the data publicly available in 2017 during Trump’s presidency (Dreier, 2023).
Duvan Pérez, age 16, image provided by NBC News
Some people are in the country legally and have permission to work and are still exploited. The federal government does provide a type of visa for temporary agricultural labor, called an H-2A visa. Approximately 10% of the agricultural workforce in the U.S. is on H-2A visas (NCFH, 2020). However, this visa is the responsibility of the employer and is expensive, costing nearly $2,000 per employee in administrative fees, plus legal requirements to cover travel costs and housing (NCFH, 2020). Between 2010 and 2017, the number of immigrants admitted to the U.S. under the H-2A visa program increased by 196% (NCFH, 2020). The H-2A workforce is 93% male and tends to live in temporary housing provided by the hiring company (NCFH, 2020). Despite legal permission to work, many H-2A workers still experience exploitative conditions such as wage theft, substandard housing, and hazardous conditions. A person’s H-2A visa is tied to the specific employer who brought them to work, meaning that H-2A employees are not at liberty to switch employers while in the country (NCFH, 2020). This arrangement makes H-2A employees more vulnerable to exploitation.
Whether on a visa or not, this new rural labor force is very different from a labor force that lives permanently in the area, has families, opens businesses, gets counted in the census, goes to school and church, and gets elected to local government. This is not a dig at the laborers, as it is no personal flaw of theirs, and it is also not really a dig at the surrounding local population either, who are not the people deciding whether this migrant labor force stays or goes. It’s a fact about the system.
Rural areas and small towns are losing out from the fact that the majority of people performing agricultural labor are not creating vibrant communities where they work. Despite the high volume of people flowing in and out of rural places to work in these industries, they remain largely invisible to the rest of American society, profoundly exploited, and sharply segregated from local populations. For companies whose main goal is access to workers who will accept their low wages and lack of benefits and protections, no matter how temporary those workers are, the system is working just fine. It is not necessarily many companies’ top priority to find a pathway so that the workers and the community can truly invest in one another.
It is not that immigrants came to rural America and “stole” all the jobs. It is more so that corporations eliminated the jobs that used to exist, created entirely different jobs, many of them involving illegal labor practices, and then opened the doors for a new workforce to fill those jobs. I think many people, if phrased this way, would agree that a job with a living wage, union protection, and full benefits is a fundamentally different job than working for minimum wage (or lower) with no protections and no benefits. These are different jobs. The old jobs are dead. When talking about this with people sometimes I say: “Is it really that immigrants stole your job, or is it that your job just doesn’t exist anymore? The jobs that immigrants are working are not the jobs that you once worked. And who was it that decided that? Immigrants? Or the company?” But unfortunately demagoguery encourages placing blame on the migrant workers themselves rather than any other hand that has tipped the scales. And the hands have truly tipped the scales towards lots of different people being harmed in rural America. It’s not just one group or another group that is suffering. Misery loves company.
A 2021 report entitled “Coping with Stress, Suicide, and Stigma in Farm Country” named the following factors contributing to toxic stress and community trauma in rural settings (Ryder-Marks, 2021):
* Chronic population loss due to economic change
* Lack of social or economic mobility
* Financial uncertainty due to macro and microeconomic factors
* Structural racism
* Structural marginalization of people experiencing poverty
* Climate change and related disasters (fires, droughts)
* Mass incarceration
* Drugs and alcohol including prescription opioids
* Lack of access to health care, healthy food, education
* Erosion of social safety nets
* “Invisible” populations: migrant workers, prisoners, reservations
The fact that we so often aggregate data based on race is hiding what is going on with rural America. Although “rural” is not synonymous with “white,” rural areas are proportionally more white than urban areas. Because we always group urban and rural white people together in racialized data, a few things get buried.
Take wealth as an example. White people, as a demographic, are becoming more polarized with regards to wealth, with the rich becoming richer, the poor becoming poorer, and the middle class hollowing out. White people, more so than other demographics, were previously centered in the middle classes in more of a neat-and-tidy Bell Curve. This was particularly true from 1947 to 1974 when America had the world’s largest and most prosperous middle class (Hanauer, 2020). White people are now shifting more dramatically than any other demographic towards the extremes of poor and ultrarich. However, lumping extreme data points together can still give averages that seem pretty moderate, even though they do not represent the lived experiences of most people in the dataset. A lot of statistics about “average” white wealth are really an imaginary middle point between extreme wealth and poverty, a middle point that fewer and fewer people are actually living.
For example, one statistic reveals that the “average” white family has a $168K higher net worth than the “average” Black family (Kochar & Moslimani, 2023). And yet, somehow, 63% of America lives paycheck-to-paycheck (Picchi, 2023). How do you reconcile the massive difference in “average” wealth compared to the rate of people living paycheck-to-paycheck?
U.S. Census data for 2022 contains the following demographic breakdown about the percentage of households (not individuals) that earn over $200K a year (Guzman & Kollar, 2023):
22.8% of Asian households
12.3% of white households
6.8% of Hispanic households
6.1% of Black households
5.5% of American Indian/Alaska Native households
However, “over $200K” is as high as the U.S. Census data reports. We do not get a breakdown on how high over $200K this income bracket goes. We don’t get census data about the percentage of people who make over a million dollars, or over a billion. (Which is kind of wild, if you think about it.) Only 12.3% of white households make over $200K a year, which doesn’t seem like a lot. But the wealth in the high end of this bracket is ENORMOUS, and considerably higher than the other racial demographics in this “over $200K/year” bracket. Consider the following realities:
* The U.S.has more billionaires than any other nation on earth - 814 billionaires as of 2024, including 10 who are in the $100+ billion club (Peterson-Withorn, 2024).
* Since the mid 1960s the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans have doubled their wealth. (Barber, 2024, pg. 9).
* At the turn of the 21st century, the top 20 percent of people held 85 percent of the total wealth in the United States. (Barber, 2024, pg. 9).
* Two decades later, in 2023, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans owned more wealth than 80 percent of the U.S. population combined. (Federal Reserve, 2023)
Although some of the ultrarich are not white, the overwhelming majority are white (Murray & Jenkins, 2024). So, this 12.3% of white people who make over $200k a year includes the overwhelming majority of the ultrarich, and when this cohort is combined with the rest of white people to calculate “average wealth,” it brings the average way up - deceptively so.
Now consider the other end of the Census data: the percentage of households (again, not individuals, but households) that live off of a combined income of less than $35K a year:
16% of Asian households
22% of white households
23.3% of Hispanic households
29.9% of American Indian/Alaska Native households
33.5% of Black households
These statistics clearly show a disproportionate lack of wealth impacting Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic people. That being said, some people would still be surprised to learn that there are nearly double the number of white households living with less than $35K a year than there are white households living with more than $200K a year. Some people might also be surprised to learn the following:
* In 2016 there was not a single county in the United States where someone working full time at minimum wage could afford to rent a two-bedroom apartment (Institute for Policy Studies, 2018).
* While more than 19 million American renters are paying more than 30% of their limited incomes on housing (US Census Bureau, 2022), 600,000 people are homeless and millions more live on the edge of homelessness (US Department for Housing and Urban Development, 2022).
* Sixty-three percent of U.S. workers today live paycheck-to-paycheck and 40% have no net worth at all (Picchi, 2023).
* The average worker in America makes $54 a week less than they did 50 years ago after adjusting for inflation (DeSilver, 2018).
The official statistic of the federal government is that 11.3% of Americans live in poverty. However, there are some serious problems with how the federal government calculates its official poverty measure (OPM). The current OPM is an outdated metric that has not been updated since it was first developed in the 1960s to determine which families could benefit from anti-poverty measures. The federal government estimated that a family’s budget was roughly three times what they spent on food, a measure that was fairly accurate at the time (Barber, 2024). However, since the 1960s, food prices have risen fourfold, but median rent in the U.S. has risen more than sixteen-fold (Barber, 2024). Using a measure that multiplies a family’s food budget by three will no longer predict whether a family is going to be homeless next month.
Researchers have suggested an alternative OPM, and Biden adopted this alternative OPM in some of his speeches and 2020 campaign materials, although federal policy has not yet changed (Rizzo, 2019; Barber, 2024). This new proposed OPM asks the question: what is the budget required to cover basic necessities, broken down for every type of family structure (single adult, two parents with two children, etc.), and for every U.S. county (to account for huge variations in housing costs, in particular), and how many individuals and families are unable to afford basic necessities where they live? (Fuhrer, 2024). This massive and complex effort was spearheaded by the Economic Policy Institute and recently released its findings. Using this measure, 140 million Americans would qualify as poor or low-income, which is 43% of the population (Fuhrer, 2024).
Of these 140 million, 24 million are Black (17%), 66 million are white (47%), and 50 million (36%) are all other races (Fuhrer, 2024). Given that the U.S. population is 13% Black and 60% white, Black people are overrepresented and white people are underrepresented amongst the poor (U.S. Census, 2022). Additionally, the 24 million Black people living below this alternative OPM line make up 59% of the total Black population of the U.S., revealing the incredible economic disadvantage placed on this community (Fuhrer, 2024). The 66 million white people in poverty make up 37% of the total white population, by contrast (Fuhrer, 2024). However, it is also true that there are over two times as many poor white people as poor Black people, and white people make up the single largest demographic cohort of the poor.
Two things about white people are being obscured in most of these conversations about wealth that use “average” data: the extreme accumulation of wealth by one part of white America and the economic downfall of another part of white America. These trends are being obscured in our most commonly-used Census data, for starters, because we don’t distinguish families making $250 million a year from families making $250K a year. This hides the ultra-wealthy. And then in any data that breaks people down into racial demographics, the increasingly wealthy white ruling class is always averaged together with an increasingly impoverished white working class. The extremes amongst white people are smoothed out. The economic inequality facing Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic communities is much clearer in the data at first glance…not that this translates to political and cultural will to do anything about it.
No one thing has caused economic inequality in America. It is all connected: technology and globalization killing industry in the Rust Belt and Appalachia, vertical consolidation in agriculture industries of rural America, willingness to commit genocide against Indigenous peoples, willingness to make every possible effort to keep Black people an exploited class rather than full owners and participants in American democracy, willingness to sacrifice the white middle class/working class for corporate gain, willingness to exploit migrants and have the punishment for corporations be a “slap on the wrist” compared to the profits, drugs and the War on Drugs, housing crises, the list goes on and on. It is all connected.
Not all poor white people are rural, and not all rural white people are poor. And not all rural people are white, and not all white people are rural. However, there is a connection between race, class, and geography that I think few people take the time to name explicitly. Poor white people are disproportionately concentrated in rural areas and small towns, and their poverty is not a fluke or an accident. By and large, their economic well-being has been sabotaged and little has been offered to them as a solution or path forward. Rev. Dr. William Barber II, a Black American clergyman and Civil Rights leader, just published a new book called White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy. He writes,“Yes, racism persists, making rates of poverty higher in communities of color. But the same lie that blames Black people for their poverty also prevents us from seeing the pain of poor white families who have been offered little more than ‘whiteness’ and angry tweets to sustain them in an economy where the cost of housing, healthcare, education, and transportation have skyrocketed while wages have stagnated for almost all Americans” (2024, pg. xiv).
Rev. Dr. Barber II writes, “And this is what you never hear: most of America’s poor are white. I sound the alarm about white poverty because I’m convinced that we can’t expose the peculiar exceptionalism of America’s poverty without seeing how it impacts the very people that our myths pretend to privilege” (pg. 10). America would not hold the exceptional status as the country with the highest rate of poverty in the Global North were it not for white poverty (Alston, 2018).
JD Vance wrote extensively about family demons in Hillbilly Elegy and immediately threw his kin into the double standard that is far too common in America: all families have demons, both rich and poor, but only the poor have their socioeconomic status blamed on their most intimate flaws. But blaming all systemic poverty on the personal failings of the impoverished is too simplistic. “The poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny. His or her existence is not politically neutral, and it is not ethically innocent. The poor are a byproduct of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible. They are marginalized by our social and cultural world.” - Gustavo Gutierrez (from Foiles, 2019, pg. i).
JD Vance has since “bent the knee” to a right wing that wants to place the blame for America’s woes anywhere but themselves. I say to them: Just like you can’t blame all poor people individually for massive economic failures, you can’t blame your problems on immigrants, drag queens, Muslims, transgender children, Black Lives Matter, DEI programs, antifa, birth control, gun control, environmentalists or most of the other boogeymen reviled by the right. Rural and small town America has been sacrificed to corporate greed and cultural apathy. Politicians across the ideological spectrum have been complicit, and it’s been going on for decades. Not everyone who is suffering in rural and small-town America is white, and not everyone who is white and poor lives in rural or small-town America. But in a lot of ways the conversation about the sacrifice of rural and small town America is a conversation about white poverty. White Americans suffering from poverty have a group who is squarely responsible for their pain: the overwhelmingly white ruling class. This is dirt that some white people did to some other white people and you know it, JD Vance. You know it.
Group #2 - To the Liberal Elite:
Stop scapegoating the poor.
You can’t actually blame poor people for Trump, so stop trying. And so many people in rural and small town America can smell your disdain and arrogance from thousands of miles away, they really can, and they know full well that you don’t care whether they live or die. They are the living and dying proof. Stop scapegoating poor people for America turning into a strip mall death cult.
A report from Columbia University showed that low-income voter turnout has been at minimum 20% lower than that of higher-income voters for the past 36 years straight (Hartley, 2020). The report also showed that voter suppression measures kept 34 million low-income people of all races from voting in 2016 (Hartley, 2020). In 2016 when Trump was elected, only 55.7% of the voting-age population actually voted (Grimlich, 2020).
It’s an oft-quoted statistic that “53% of American white women voted for Trump in 2020.” This is misleading. Fifty-three percent of white women who voted cast a ballot for Trump (Igielnik, Keeter, & Hartig, 2021). In raw numbers, that is only about one-third of the total population of adult white women in America (US Census, 2022). This one-third of white women who voted for Trump is still far higher than any other racial demographic of women (Igielnik, Keeter, & Hartig, 2021). The correlation with whiteness is plain as day. But it is inaccurate to say that the majority of American white women have cast a vote for Trump. They have not. The two-thirds majority of white women are those who voted for Biden or didn’t vote at all. The white women who voted for Trump tend to be older and wealthier than the average American (The Economist, 2024). The white women who don’t vote at all tend to be poor and low-income (Barber, 2024). Pointing this out is not about apologetics for the people whose votes for Trump made their voices loud and clear. It’s about the willingness to question - whose voice isn’t being heard at all?
From Pew Research Center
I believe it would be naive to speculate that all poor and low-income people would vote the way Liberal Elites would want if they did begin to vote en masse. However, looking at existing data from prior elections is not speculation. The poor and low-income people that do vote have not been a solid base for Trump. In the 2016 election, Donald Trump won every income bracket above $50,000 but lost every income bracket below $50,000 - by more than 9 points (Barber, 2024). The majority of individuals making less than $50K a year who did actually vote did NOT vote for Trump, and this is across ALL demographic lines of race, gender, religion, and geography. Remember, there are nearly twice as many white households making less than $35K a year as there are white households making over $200K (US Census, 2022). White people make up the single largest demographic of poor people - who Trump has never been able to win over. You cannot blame Donald Trump on poor white people.
The fact that so few poor and low-income people “participate in democracy” is not a rebuke solely to one party or the other - it is an indictment of our entire society. Alienation from society can occur on many different levels, from neglect and abandonment to downright abuse. Some poor and low-income people are marginalized by intentional efforts to keep them out of the voting pool or dull their impact, such as restrictive voter registration laws or gerrymandering. Other poor and low-income people are marginalized by collective failures to address poverty. When surveyed, most low-income people who do not vote state the following reasons for not voting: they do not feel they are represented by the candidates who are running, or they do not think their vote would make a difference (Barber, 2024).
We only need to look at patterns of mass incarceration to help explain why this might be the case for both Black and white people living in poverty. Mass incarceration has been the main “solution” to poverty in both urban and rural areas, orchestrated by both Democrats and Republicans. In liberal states the prevailing poverty is in urban communities of color. In conservative states the prevailing poverty is in rural white communities. Both groups experience mass incarceration.
Liberal/urban states have lower rates of incarceration over all, but higher racial disparities, sometimes significantly so. Rural states with higher overall rates of incarceration still have racial disparities, but not at the same levels. Consider, for the following states, the rate at which the Black population is incarcerated compared to the white population (Prison Policy Institute, 2024; Widra, 2024):
In these states, the general population is majority white, but the incarcerated population is majority Black (or in the case of New York that does not have a true majority of any race incarcerated, Black people are the single largest cohort, and the incarcerated population is majority non-white). In these states, Black people are incarcerated at 7.5-11.9 times higher rates than white people. Compare this to (Prison Policy Institute, 2024; Widra, 2024):
In these states the majority of the population is white, the majority of the incarcerated population is white, and the rates of incarceration are higher. However, the Black population is still incarcerated at 2.9-4.4 times higher rates than the white population.
Many rural states have higher incarceration rates in general, and while still disproportionate towards communities of color, have both majority white populations and majority white incarcerated populations. This is compared to more urban/liberal states where incarcerated populations are majority Black, despite the general population still being majority white, meaning that mass incarceration is extremely targeted towards communities of color.
What is either party offering immiserated and impoverished people other than mass incarceration? Prisons and policing are the main “solution” being offered in both urban and rural areas to address the shared suffering of poverty, addiction, homelessness, violence, and despair.
Does it make sense now? Just one of many reasons why poor Black people and poor white people might have disengaged from voting in general? Let alone the barriers that people with criminal records face in voting at all? Can you see how a broad array of people impacted by poverty and mass incarceration are being betrayed by the political machines that dominate their home states? Can you understand why so many people living in poverty do not feel represented, and even feel that voting wouldn’t make a difference in the issues they face? The biggest battle is not to get poor people to stop supporting Trump - the biggest battle is poor people having a voice at all.
So answer me this, Liberal Elite - for all the contempt you have towards “dumb hicks” who are “getting what they deserve” because Republicans keep getting elected - do the Black people in liberal states who are incarcerated at rates 7.5-11.9 times higher than their white counterparts “deserve” what is happening to them because Democrats keep getting elected? So do the poor white communities in Republican-run states with massively higher rates of incarceration really “deserve” what is being done to them either? Or are a lot of ordinary people being betrayed by those claiming to represent them? Is it possible that neither party is truly addressing the needs of people in poverty? What leg do you have to stand on, exactly?
Liberal Elite, there is so much you don’t see and don’t know. I grew up in southern Indiana. Remember that Indiana’s rate of incarceration is nearly double that of Illinois and Indiana’s jail population is 77% white. The IndyStar conducted a detailed investigative report on Indiana’s county jails in 2021 (Evans & Martin, 2021). Indiana does not have a public agency that tracks the number of people who die in its county jails. But the results of the IndyStar investigation found that, given what it was able to find from news accounts, obituaries, and FOIA-ing sheriffs and coroners offices, and the data that is available from other states who do bother to track such things, Indiana has one of the deadliest jail systems in the country. Mental health crises, drugs, and poverty land tens of thousands of people in pre-trial detention, hundreds die, and the state doesn’t even bother to keep count.
The IndyStar found that many of the deaths were fully caught on the jail cameras. I watched some of them and wish that I hadn’t. Some are tortured to death in restraint chairs, which jailers call “going for a ride.” I watched the death of a white man named Jeremy Oswalt, 38 years old. He’d been in pre-trial detention for 8 weeks. Alone in a cell surrounded by trash, feces, and urine, he’d been handcuffed and strapped naked to the restraint chair. A hood was pulled over his head. Sometimes a jailer would enter the cell and splash a bucket of water on him. He died of hypothermia, dehydration, and malnutrition. He’d been booked after having hallucinations and tweaking at some customers at a convenience store. No one had been hurt. Another white man, Jerod Draper, was tortured to death by six jailers with Tasers while being “taken for a ride” on a restraint chair, a mere eight hours after being arrested for meth possession during a traffic stop. Turns out it doesn’t matter what your skin color is, everyone cries out for their mother when they’re being tortured to death. Some of the footage the IndyStar found was people hanging themselves while jailers just watched.
Jerod Draper in an undated family photo (Image source: IndyStar)
My first time not being able to make someone’s bail was when I was 19. I had two friends, Andrew and Sarah, a couple, both white, who were about my same age and who were living on the streets over by where I stayed. I didn’t have housing to offer them at the time, but we hung out whenever we could. Sometimes I’d bring food. Sometimes they insisted on sharing their food too, if they had some. Sometimes I’d give them rides. I had a white ‘98 Volvo Station wagon at the time, entirely held together with duct tape, and you had to use a two-by-four to keep the trunk open. Sometimes we’d just chill. I was using a wheelchair at the time and these were the days when I would just park myself in my wheelchair somewhere in town and chill with whoever was on the streets nearby. But with Andrew and Sarah we’d call and text too, when they had phones. Much of their time was spent trying to find jobs and not get beat senseless by the cops who were escalating violence around town at all the homeless people at the time.
One day Sarah called me in a panic - Andrew had been arrested on suspicion of a “stolen cell phone” but they found a small amount of meth on him. I went to put money on his books so he could buy socks. It was February and we all know the jails are freezing and they don’t give anyone socks or underwear or anything else besides the basic 1-ply jumpsuit. You have to buy all that stuff in commissary. I had enough for socks and underwear and toothpaste. But we couldn’t make the $2,000 bail. Then he disappeared. Sarah couldn’t find him. Staff at the jail just said he “wasn’t there anymore.” They claimed he wasn’t in their system and refused to say anything else. His cell phone was still confiscated. He simply disappeared. Sarah was distraught. We looked all over town. We never found him. I wonder if the IndyStar did.
The location where I last saw Andrew, the parking lot of the McDonald’s on Pete Ellis Drive in Bloomington, IN.
Many small towns in Indiana would buy bus tickets for people who were living on the streets and send them to Bloomington, where Indiana University is and where I went to school, because there are more resources in a college town - hypothetically. But too many towns throughout the entire state did this rather than confront the systemic issues at hand. And then we saw the whole thing fall apart - not only did Bloomington genuinely run out of capacity to address all the needs of the people arriving, but also the liberal facade in the university town totally cracked. A lot of the people who weren’t directly impacted by these issues, but had thought that they had liberal ideas about homelessness, suddenly realized they didn’t want to see all these poor people. There’s a lot of transplants in a college town who are not originally from rural areas, who, when suddenly confronted with the realities of rural America, had a very adverse reaction. Everything got worse in 2013 after they found Ian Stark’s frozen body behind the stairs of a “respectable” apartment building near campus. Can’t have poor people starting to die on the literal doorsteps of the comfortable or affluent.
The cops in Indiana do the same thing as cops in Chicago where they raid homeless encampments and push people from place to place, or just put people in jail. But in Indiana, the sweeps and raids often end up pushing people into the woods. And that’s where people really become invisible. So that’s where the cops set encampments on fire. And there’s people who don’t make it out alive. And everyone in town came to understand this - if they succeed in pushing people out into the forests, that’s where the violence really escalates, that’s where things really turn deadly. So the attempt to defend encampments in town started to escalate as well. One night in July 2017 we were trying to prevent one of these sweeps that would push people into the woods and a prison guard plowed his car through the crowd. He missed me by inches, carrying away the person next to me.
When cops burn you alive in a forest, your skin is the first thing to go. And if that’s not some American poetry, I don’t know what the hell is.
In case it still needs to be said, Liberal Elite:
No one deserves this.
No one deserves this.
No one deserves this.
Aftermath at a homeless encampment in the woods outside of Bloomington, IN that was torched on December, 18th, 2024. Photo credit: Jeremy Hogan, The Bloomingtonian
Group #3 - To poor and working class people of color in urban areas:
The house is on fire.
At the beginning of this booklet I said that I was accustomed to hearing your wariness, distrust, and mythologies about rural America. I’m not here to try and take away wariness and distrust - those, I respect. I’m only here to talk about the mythologies. I am not trying to drum up sympathy for white people. Sympathy is politically toothless. But I’m not here to lecture anyone about “solidarity” either. I think solidarity is only possible when trust is built and respect is earnt and I’m not going to presume that foundation is already laid.
You know the phrase “truth & reconciliation” - I’m only here to do the “truth” part, to bear witness honestly to what is happening to my communities. How you reconcile that truth with your own truth is for you to determine. I’m not here to tell you how to feel. And I’m definitely not here to ask you to care, or to act, or to somehow carry the burden of the suffering I’m telling you about.
I’m here to tell truths that might help us all see through some powerful lies from powerful people. These lies have different effects in different communities but they only produce harm.
I’ve met a lot of people of color in Chicago who genuinely believe that urban communities are the areas of the country most plagued by violence, a narrative that you hear on right-wing media constantly. The truth is more complicated. Chicago is indeed a tragic outlier with a murder rate far higher than other major cities like New York City or Los Angeles, but it’s also true that the average murder rate is 40% higher in the 25 states that voted for Trump compared to those that voted for Biden (Murdock & Kessler, 2022). Most of the states in the top ten for per capita murder rate are largely conservative and rural. The researchers who published this finding removed the largest cities in these “red states” from the data and the pattern still held, which confirms that it isn’t just the most urban areas in these “red states” that are driving the murder rates: this is rural violence. (See Red State Murder Problem for the full analysis.) Three of the five states with the largest increase in murder rate in recent years are overwhelmingly rural too: Wyoming at 91.7% increase, South Dakota at 69%, and Nebraska at 59.1%. All of this data is contrary to the dominant media narrative that Democratic-run urban areas are most plagued by violent crime, which many people within these communities seem to have internalized as well. Chicago has its problems, but it’s not alone in that regard.
For what it’s worth, my friends in Chicago tend to be surprised when I tell them that there is a 127% difference in the rate of violent crime between the wealthy, majority-white suburb of Deerfield, IL (near Chicago) and the significantly less wealthy, majority-white town of Bloomington, IN where I grew up (according to 2022 data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation). Some friends in Chicago are surprised to learn that the first shooting I ever witnessed was in Pigeon Hill, a neighborhood in Bloomington with mostly Section 8 housing, at the age of 12.
So I ask you: Who benefits from hiding these truths with mythologies?
When asked, “What area of the U.S. has the highest rate of children in the foster system?” I believe that many people would name a community like the South Side of Chicago. Some would do so out of overt racism. Others would do so out of the opposite - the desire to name the impact of white supremacy on communities of color who have their children taken away from them at disproportionate rates, which is true. However, neither group answered the question correctly.
The area of the U.S. with the highest rate of children in the foster system is rural West Virginia (Amorbieta, 2024). The state is 93% white and ranked 49th in the country in terms of median income (U.S. Census, 2022).
So I ask you: Who benefits from hiding these truths with mythologies?
My friends in Chicago are not surprised when I talk about the Islamophobic hate crime I survived in 2016 when two white men in a pick-up truck attacked me on a rural road in Indiana. However, my friends in Chicago *are* surprised to learn that, in the rural, overwhelmingly white county where I was attacked, 27% of all children have a household member who is incarcerated and 51% of all children have any family member who is incarcerated (Keesler et al., 2021). My friends are also surprised to learn that this county has no public transit. None whatsoever. Anywhere in the county.
So I ask you: who benefits from hiding these truths with mythologies?
Photos of the attackers’ truck, State Road 37, Indiana, July 22nd, 2016
It is a well-known fact that the War on Drugs has been a major driving factor in mass incarceration over the last 40 years. It is also a well-known fact that there are blatant racial disparities when it comes to sentencing drug crimes. The most notorious is the sentencing difference between crack and cocaine. Although crack and cocaine are the same substance, crack is associated with Black users and cocaine is associated with white users. And lo and behold, you have to be caught in possession of roughly 18x more cocaine to be sentenced to the same amount of time as crack possession (Nellis, 2024). Crack possession is sentenced with 18x harsher sentences than cocaine. What is far less known is that cocaine is not just a “white people drug” - it’s a rich white people drug. Poor white people don’t do cocaine, they do meth. And turns out, there is not a similar racial disparity between crack and meth. Nationally, people serve roughly the same amount of time for crack and meth (Bjerk, 2017). Cocaine users get off easy compared to both groups.
Again, I don’t say this with any kind of demand to you - I make no demand on your time, energy, care, or mercy. I say all of this simply to pose the questions: Whose bad behavior is being hidden here? Who is getting away with harm? Could it be that the same bad actors are hurting multiple different communities in different ways? And they’ll pick whatever reason they want to justify the damage?
Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II writes (White Poverty, pg. xvi), “I take on white poverty as a declaration that Black people may have problems, but we are not the problem. Other people face the same struggles we do.” I think I understand the Reverend’s point - the existence and prevalence of white poverty helps combat racist myths that paint Black people, and Blackness itself, as a problem. However, I am cautious about the word “same.”
I don’t think that people of color and white poor and working class people are experiencing the exact same struggle. When communities of color experience poverty, violence, and mass incarceration, it is so often for the mere fact of skin color - it is racism. Poor white people are not experiencing these things because of racism against the color of their skin. But it is also true that the color of their skin has not prevented them from experiencing poverty, violence, and mass incarceration. And this is awkward and hard to talk about.
White supremacy built a system where whiteness was constructed to give white people safety, abundance, and the presumption of innocence (aka impunity) while denying these exact things to non-white peoples. So how do you talk about white communities who have been stripped of their safety, abundance, and presumption of innocence? How do you talk about white people who do not have access to these things and are not lying about that, but at the same time are not experiencing any of these bad outcomes because of racism? I can’t claim to have it down perfectly, but I would like to suggest we need something besides pretending this group of people doesn’t exist or the same old tired right wing approaches of putting blame in all the wrong places. Talking about white poverty in rural and small town America is not easy, and as a nation we don’t have much practice doing it well. There’s a lot of potential to step on people’s toes - and traumas.
I have a memory from Indiana: During Black Lives Matters protests in 2014, a friend of mine was approached by Black organizers, most of whom were from out-of-state, to “self-organize” poor whites who had also suffered police brutality and get them to show up for BLM efforts. My friend gave it a shot. He built a relationship with the mother of a young, unarmed white man who had been shot and killed by police. The mother was overjoyed that finally someone had come and talked to her. She was very eager to tell the story of her son’s death and the senselessness of it, the cruelty of it. She was open to the idea of speaking with the mother of a young unarmed Black man who had recently been shot by cops in Indianapolis. Both grieving mothers were open, as it turned out, and connected with one another.
My friend spoke with the white mother about throwing her weight behind BLM events where the mother of this other young Black man was going to speak. The white mother was enthused and even offered to talk about her son and his death and the brutality of police violence. The response from the BLM organizers, however, was, “This is not a space that centers white bodies.” The white mother’s response was, “What the heck does that mean?” And from there, the entire effort fell apart. This was not a gap that could be bridged. No one involved had much practice bridging the gap, to be honest. The only people who built a true bridge were the two grieving mothers - privately, intimately, as only grieving mothers can. The political contradictions, however, were beyond anyone’s skill at that point. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this encounter since: How do you help a poor white mother contextualize her son’s death so that she understands why it’s not her turn to speak at a BLM protest? Or, how do you help BLM organizers who aren’t from rural America to understand enough about police brutality in this context that they actually welcome a white mother weighing in? How do you help everyone on all sides articulate why Black kids and poor white kids get killed by cops, when the reasons are different but the outcomes are the same? These are the questions that I am trying to prepare for in doing all of this thinking and processing. Ten years later, in 2024, have we made any more progress?
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in a 1965 speech (Barber, 2024): “I fear I am integrating my people into a burning house.” Dr. King feared that by trying to integrate with white society, “we are walking into a place that does not understand that this nation needs to be deeply concerned with the plight of the poor and disenfranchised.” I consider his words prophetic.
The people who benefit most from white supremacy and capitalism have never wanted the common people to see that the house is on fire. Hiding the suffering of rural and small-town America hides how high the flames are.
When the powers that be (whether that be right wing politicians or mainstream identity politics) act like white people don’t experience poverty, that white families don’t get their kids taken away, that society cares when white people get addicted to drugs, or that white people don’t experience mass incarceration, they may also be convincing people that the “house” (aka majority white society) is not on fire. In particular they may be convincing white people who are still living comfortably and don’t feel the flames.
When I talk about the suffering of rural and small-town America, I’m not doing it to compete with anyone’s pain. I am only here to say - the house *is* on fire.
YOU feel it. I feel it too. And turns out, none of us have been lying about the burning we’ve been feeling our whole lives. Dr. King was right about the burning house, and so are we.
Since 2020, six people in my life have been shot. Those six people who were shot are exclusively Black people from Chicago and white people from Indiana.
I’m doing this because I want EVERYONE I love to make it out of the burning house alive.
References
1A Podcast. (2023, April 27). New state laws are rolling back regulations on child labor.National Public Radio.
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/27/1172544561/new-state-laws-are-rolling-back-regulations-on-child-labor
Alston, P. (2018). Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights on his mission to the United States of America. United Nations General Assembly.
https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/1629536?ln=en&v=pdf
Amorbieta, M. (2024, June 13). A foster care system in crisis: West Virginia faces a legal reckoning. NBC News.
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