rural and urban

By Lisa R. Pruitt  I don't watch TV or follow much pop culture, and most of the country music I occasionally listen to is on old albums by the likes of Sara Evans, Faith Hill, Martina McBride and Alison Krauss.  But this was apparently a "big week" in country music thanks to Brad Paisley and his new album Wheelhouse.  I was on the road on Tuesday, but by the time I was catching up on email early Wednesday morning, I had lots of messages from friends giving me a heads up on the furor associated with Paisley's new song, "Accidental Racist," which includes a cameo from LL Cool J.  Commentators have varyingly discussed Paisley and his new song thusly: a "middle-age rural liberal reckoning" "well intentioned, if cringeworthy" "cringe-inducing sincerity" "ponderous and lumpy, the worst sort of agitpop" "some kind of elaborate joke" "intellectual undercookedness" "country's ultimate postmodernist" "how we 'do' race in the age of Obama" "a masterwork of camp to heap our snark upon" and, perhaps the most high-brow reference, "a Derridean act of derring-do." In short, as one commentator put it, the song has attracted "an unusual amount of ... sneering." Eric Weisbard did not sneer in his piece for NPR.  His headline references the history of white southern musical identity, and Weisbard touches on biases against the South, as well as white-on-white biases: As you may have heard, Paisley is sifting through some rubble of his own right now, having been declared a national laughingstock by virtually all commentators coming from outside mainstream country. But then, this condescending dismissal is nothing new. There is a history to "Accidental Racist," the history of how white Southern musicians — heatedly, implicitly, at times self-servingly and not always successfully — try to talk about who they are in answer to what others dismissively assume they are. After all, while the Jim Crow South was Anglo supremacist politically, American culture offered a very different dynamic. Ever since white Northerners started putting out their records, Southern whites have represented a backward rural mindset in a national culture of jazzy modernity.  ... Variety loved jazz but scorned the hillbilly in 1926 as " 'poor white trash' genera. The great majority, probably 95 percent, can neither read nor write English. Theirs is a community all to themselves. [They are] illiterate and ignorant, with the intelligence of morons."

By Lisa R. Pruitt One of the most e-mailed items in the New York Times for the past day or so has been Claire Vaye Watkins “The Ivy League Was Another Planet.” (The alternative headline is “Elite Colleges Are As Foreign as Mars.”) In her op-ed, Watkins recounts her journey from nonmetropolitan Pahrump, Nevada to college at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her story is that of a kid from a working class family in “rural” Nevada (her description; technically, Pahrump is not rural because, though unincorporated, its 2010 population is more than 35,000) who didn’t know about colleges or how to pick one.  Lucky for her, Watkins went on to get an MFA from Ohio State and is now an assistant professor of English at Bucknell. Watkins writes of getting her wake-up call about dramatic variations in educational resources when she was a high school senior, vying for a prestigious state-funded scholarship. That’s when she met a peer from a Las Vegas high school who attended a magnet school, took college prep courses, had a tutor, and had spent time abroad.  The variations in resources, she realized, were based on geography:  he was an urban kid and she was a rural one.  But they were also based on class.  She doesn’t specify the background of the Vegas teen, but she mentions that her mother and step-father had not gone to college.  I note that Pahrump’s poverty rate is a fairly steep 21.1%.  Just 10.1% of residents there have a bachelor’s degree or better, compared to about 30% nationwide. Even after meeting the privileged teen from Vegas, however, Watkins didn’t know what she didn’t know.  She remained ignorant of the world of elite colleges, a sector that represented the “other planet” or “Mars” of the headline.  Instead, Watkins applied to UN Reno, she explains, because she had once taken a Greyhound bus to visit friends there. As Watkins expresses it, when poor rural kids apply to college (which, I might add, is altogether too rare), they typically apply to those institutions to which they have been “incidentally exposed.”

By Lisa R. Pruitt Americans like to think they live in a society unstratified by class, a society of equal opportunity, where the American dream survives.  Joe Bageant, a journalist turned cultural critic, challenged these myths with inimitable intensity, compassion, and wit. Along the way, he reminded us of the links between the nation’s white working class and rural America.  Bageant died earlier this year at the age of 64. I first heard the name Joe Bageant in, of all places, Waarnambool, Australia.  It was November, 2010, and I was there to give a lecture at the Rural and Regional Law and Justice Conference.  After my talk, “Toward a Critical Legal Ruralism,” an Australian law professor approached me and recommended the book Deer Hunting with Jesus:  Dispatches from America's Class Wars by Joe Bageant.  I promptly purchased it.  Who could resist such a provocative title? I found that what the academic literature teaches about class wars, Bageant expressed in sharper, colloquial terms, and I discussed Bageant in my essay, The Geography of the Class Culture Wars. The scholarly literature tells us that progressive elites look down on the white working class and fail to see their struggles, including the struggle within the white working class by which the “settled,” disciplined working class differentiate themselves from the “hard living.” Bageant—consistent with his rural roots—expressed this distinction between the settled and the hard living as that between rednecks and white trash, explaining:

By Lisa R. Pruitt In a prior post about Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford’s book, No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal:  Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life, I mentioned Ross Douthat’s assertion that “the downscale, the rural and the working-class” whites were most disadvantaged in elite college admissions.  In this second installment about the book and Douthat’s 2010 column comments on it, I want to discuss the rural issue, which Douthat characterizes as bias against rural or “Red America.”  Douthat wrote: “[W]hile most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances.” In his response to Douthat’s initial column, Espenshade clarified that rural-oriented extracurriculars are not the only ones whose value is discounted by admission offices.   Espenshade wrote: “These extracurriculars might include 4-H clubs or Future Farmers of America, as Douthat mentions, but they could also include junior ROTC, co-op work programs, and many other types of career-oriented endeavors.  Participating in these activities does not necessarily mean that applicants come from rural backgrounds.  The weak negative association with admission chances could just as well suggest that these students are somewhat ambivalent about their academic futures.” As a related matter, Espenshade clarifies that applicants from “Red” states have better odds of getting into an elite university than those from more populous states, many of which are “Blue.”

by Lisa R. Pruitt Wealth and income inequality have been getting a lot of attention in recent months--at least in the New York Times. Op-Ed columnist Bob Herbert has been especially persistent about keeping the topic on readers' radar screens; read some of his columns here, here, here, and here. Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, and Robert Frank have had a say, too. Wealth inequality was also the subject of a "Room for Debate" feature a few weeks ago. But geographic analysis of inequality has been little examined in the mainstream media until The Economist Magazine ran a couple of stories about uneven development and spatial inequality in the March 10, 2011 issue. The first "Internal affairs: The gap between rich and poor regions widened because of the recession," analyzes various nations' spatial inequality as measured by income and GDP. This analysis shows that Britain is the nation with the widest geography-based income gap: the per capita GDP is nine times greater in central London than it is in some Welsh regions. The smallest regional spreads, on the other hand, were in Italy and Germany, where "incomes in their most affluent areas are [nevertheless] almost three times those of the poorest." The United States falls at the British end of the spectrum, coming in second for inequality across regions among the nations studied. The District of Columbia, for example, is five times as rich as Mississippi. Further, the situation has worsened in the past few years.

Written by Lisa R. Pruitt In a recent post, I commented on what the film “Winter’s Bone” might reveal about white privilege.  There I discussed Ree Dolly, the film’s heroine, in the overwhelmingly white context of Taney County, Missouri, where the median household income is about 75% of the national median.  (In neighboring persistent poverty Ozark County, which seems more reflective of Ree’s milieu as depicted in the film, the median household income is about 65% of the national figure).  Now I want to discuss Ree’s whiteness and socioeconomic disadvantage in a broader context. What if Ree goes off to Southwest Missouri State in nearby Springfield, Missouri?  or even the University of Missouri?  First, should she be the beneficiary of affirmative action in getting there?  In my opinion, absolutely.  (Read a recent discussion regarding the lack of white, lower class and rural privilege in college admissions here and here).  She would bring diversity of life experience to the student body, and she represents extreme socioeconomic disadvantage.

Written by Lisa R. Pruitt Progressive law professors talk a lot about privilege, including white privilege.  If we're white (like I am), we try to be aware of it and not re-create it.  Law professors of color remind us that we benefit from it. Writing about rural people in relation to the law, which I have been doing for a few years now, has put me in an awkward position in relation to white privilege.  A lot of my work is about rural disadvantage and class, and I've been told my work is "very white."  The presumption about whiteness in my work is probably because rural places are popularly associated with stasis and homogeneity—and with white people in particular.  But I’ve written a lot about the sort of entrenched, inter-generational poverty that defines what the U.S. government labels persistent poverty, and the reality is that most persistent poverty counties are dominated by a cluster of a single racial/ethnic group:  Latina/o (Rio Grande Valley), African American (the Mississippi Delta and Black belt), American Indian (the Great Plains and Southwest) and, yes, white (Appalachia, the Ozarks plateau, the Texas panhandle).  A few of my articles have discussed racial and ethnic minorities in rural and/or persistent poverty contexts; examples are here, here and here. I have also written about impoverished rural white communities, and I do admit to being concerned about them, too.  Which brings me to Ree Dolly, 17-year-old heroine of “Winter's Bone,” the critically acclaimed indie film that won the Grand Jury Prize for Drama at Sundance this year.  The film is set in the Missouri Ozarks, about 50 miles from where I grew up in the Arkansas Ozarks, so when it began to garner media attention in the run up to its national release, I found myself holding my breath.  Who and what would it show—and how authentic would the depiction be?  Was “Winter’s Bone” going to be the 21st century “Deliverance”?  In fact, “Winter’s Bone” is pretty ugly, a very difficult film to watch.  It is also, I must admit, quite authentic in its depiction of a certain milieu.

Written by Lisa R. Pruitt I've been thinking a lot (and writing some, too) about the links between poverty and place for several years, spurred by my interest in rural populations and critical geography.  I have become increasingly convinced that place plays a profound role in who is impoverished and who isn't.  Think about how unevenly our own nation is developed and the spatial inequalities that result in terms of access to education, jobs, and both public and private services.  (Some recent articles are here and here). So it's not surprising that this item recently in the New York Times caught my eye:  "Was Today's Poverty Determined in 1000 BC?"  The story by Catherine Rampell reports on a recent study by Diego Comin, William Easterly and Erick Gong.  They gathered "gathered crude information on the state of technological development in various parts of the world in 1000 B.C.; around the birth of Jesus; and in A.D. 1500" and then compared this to current per capita income in today's nation states.   Rampell's report is accompanied by a scatterplot that depicts the relationship between a country's present wealth and the state of its technological development in A.D. 1500.  It turns out that the latter is "an extraordinarily reliable predictor" of the former.

Written by Lisa R. Pruitt The closing line of my recent blog post asked:  "Is even democracy a luxury for the poor?" Shortly after writing it, I came across this quote by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, featured in the obituary of Senator Robert C. Byrd who died last week.  Regarding the vast federal aid that Byrd garnered for West Virginia over the years, Rockefeller said Byrd knew that “before you can make life better, you have to have a road to get in there, and you have to have a sewerage system.” This comment resonated with me, struck me as accurate.  Yet it ran counter to my thinking about Robert C. Byrd for the past few decades.  While I have always considered Byrd a fine man (well, aside from his Klan membership as a younger man) and appreciated his dedication to the Senate, I saw him primarily as a poster child for the excesses of pork barrel politics.  Rarely was he in the news, it seems, without some mention of the federal aid he was able to channel to West Virginia.  Indeed, his obituary in the New York Times states that he built, "always with canny political skills, a modern West Virginia with vast amounts of federal money."  Elsewhere, it includes this quote from Senator Byrd himself, “I lost no opportunity to promote funding for programs and projects of benefit to the people back home.”  He referred to West Virginia as "one of the rock bottomest of states."

Written by Lisa R. Pruitt I've thought about vote buying a lot over the course of my life.   I'm not talking about how corporations and other affluent actors donate money to campaigns in hopes of swaying legislators' votes, or even lower-scale political patronage type activity.  I'm talking about the phenomenon at the individual level in what is arguably its most base and disturbing form:  The payment and acceptance of cold hard cash for one's vote in a particular political race or slate of races. I've been thinking about vote buying again lately because I discussed it a bit in this recent essay and because a friend from Kentucky mentioned that, in the wake of the state's May 18 primary, federal investigations into vote buying are underway in several counties in the Eastern part of the state.  (Read some  news coverage of those investigations here and here.  Also, here's another interesting Kentucky story from earlier this decade.) My interest in vote buying goes back to my childhood.  My father was involved in vote buying in the rural Arkansas county where I grew up, and he was quite open it.  I recall rather vividly one election night when he and other local men gathered at our kitchen table with the paper ballots cast that day.   If memory serves me well, they were checking to see if various people had, in fact, voted as they had been paid to do.   This was in the 1970s and 1980s in rural Arkansas, where people still cast paper ballots; in fact, I think they still do in Newton County.  My father was a life-long Democrat who bought votes on behalf of the party's local candidates, but the local Republicans engaged in the practice, too.  Indeed, the Newton County Judge (in Arkansas, the county judge is the chief elected administrative officer) was convicted of vote buying in the late 1980s and spent some time in federal prison.  U.S. v. Campbell, 845 F.2d 782 (8th Cir. 1988).

Written by Lisa R. Pruitt I started writing about rural people and places in relation to the law a few years ago, motivated in part by their near total absence from legal scholarship.  I grew up in a very rural corner of Arkansas, where most of my family of origin still lives, and it struck me that lives like theirs (and formerly mine) were largely unseen and unacknowledged by legal actors at scales other than the most local (and sometimes even by those, e.g, the Sheriff). Rural residents comprise nearly 20% of our nation's population,but they are a forgotten fifth whose lives are in many ways different to what has become a presumptive but rarely expressed urban norm in legal scholarship. (Fellow blogger Katie Porter's work on bankruptcy in rural contexts is an important exception). Parthenon General Store in Parthenon, Arkansas, which is not a census designated place; a town with a post office but with no wikipedia entry. I started studying the legal relevance of rurality about a decade ago, and I have found so much to say that I have published only within the sub-discipline I call "law and rural livelihoods" since 2006.   I expect to spend the rest of my career exploring rural people as legal subjects and rural places as context, even if it means writing my way into the very obscurity associated with rurality itself. It is not surprising, then, that as a consumer of legal scholarship I find myself looking for rural people, for acknowledgment of rural difference, rural context, rural society.  Of course, rural-urban difference is not relevant to every legal issue or every piece of legal scholarship, but from time to time I come across a law review article that seems to cry out for some acknowledgment of rurality.   That happened last week when I saw on ssrn.com an essay by Jonas Lerman titled "Food Fights and Food Rights:  Legislating the 'Delicious Revolution.'"  Lerman's abstract states in part:

Written by Lisa R. Pruitt Anyone who is following the debate about immigration and its reform in the United States is familiar with rhetoric disputing what America's core values are as a means of supporting the competing visions for who gets to be an American--or, at least, who gets to be in America legally.   Those opposing immigration talk about how the newcomers are changing America too much.  Those in favor of more lax immigration laws remind us that the United States has always been a nation of immigrants. Nowhere is this debate being waged more vigorously than in what might be thought of as America's heartland.  I was reminded of that fact this morning when I read that 57% of voters in Fremont, Nebraska, population 25,576, voted in favor of an ordinance that will "banish illegal immigrants from jobs and rental homes."  One of the things that makes the Fremont ordinance unusual among anti-immigrant activity by smallish local governments is that residents demanded this referendum--taking the matter all the way to the Nebraska Supreme Court--after city officials voted against such an ordinance.  Interestingly, the primary reason that the city's political leaders opposed the ordinance appears to be the litigation it is likely to prompt--litigation the municipality can hardly afford.  Read more here and here.