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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsI Know Why Poor Whites Chant Trump, Trump, Trump
Im just a poor white trash motherfucker. No one cares about me.
I met the man who said those words while working as a bartender in the Ozark Mountains of northwest Arkansas. It was a one-street town in Benton County. It had a beauty parlor, a gas station, and a bar where locals came on Friday nights to shoot the shit over cheap drinks and country music. I arrived in Arkansas by way of another little town in Louisiana, where all but a few local businesses had boarded up when Walmart moved in. In Arkansas, I was struggling to survive. I served drinks in the middle of the afternoon to people described as Americas white underclass in other words, people just like me.
Across the highway from the bar was the trailer park where I lived. I bought my trailer for $1000, and it looked just like you would imagine a trailer that cost $1000 would look. There was a big hole in the ceiling, and parts of the floor were starting to crumble under my feet. It leaned to one side, and the faint odor of death hung around the bathroom. No doubt a squirrel or a rat had died in the walls. I told myself that once the flesh was gone, dissolved into the nothingness, the smell would go away, but it never did. Maybe thats what vermin ghosts smell like.
I loved that trailer. Sitting in a ratty brown La-Z-Boy, I would look around my tin can and image all the ways I could paint the walls in shades of possibility. I loved it for the simple reason that it was the first and only home I have ever owned.
My trailer was parked in the middle of Walmart country, which is also home to J.B. Hunt Transportation, Glad Manufacturing, and Tyson Chicken. There is a whole lot of money in that pocket of Arkansas, but the grand wealth casts an oppressive shadow over a region entrenched in poverty. Executive mansions line the lakefronts and golf courses. On the other side of Country Club Road, trailer parks are tucked back in the woods. The haves and have-nots rarely share the same view, with one exception: politics. Benton County has been among the most historically conservative counties in Arkansas. The last Democratic president Benton County voted for was Harry S. Truman, in 1948.
There is an unavoidable question about places like Benton County, a question many liberals have tried to answer for years now: Why do poor whites vote along the same party lines as their wealthy neighbors across the road? Isnt that against their best interests?
http://www.stirjournal.com/2016/04/01/i-know-why-poor-whites-chant-trump-trump-trump/
dixiegrrrrl
(60,010 posts)LiberalArkie
(15,730 posts)desmiller
(747 posts)Response to LiberalArkie (Reply #2)
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LiberalArkie
(15,730 posts)they were more or less equal even in their own lives. "The Man" had to do something. Even Bernie went into that in one of his early speeches.
They told white workers who were earning pennies an hour, Hey, you think youre in trouble, but youre better off than the blacks,' he said. And they told straight people, Youre better off than those gay people. And they pitted men against women. Its always playing one group against another. Thats how the rich got richer while everybody else was fighting each other. Our job is to build a nation in which we all stand together.
Response to LiberalArkie (Reply #5)
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brush
(53,918 posts)to this country in the 20th century.
Slavery was not equally distributed through the south. Many of the areas such as described by the author of the piece had relatively few slaves. Some of the hardest "poor white" attitudes persist in the fringe areas of the south. A really good read on this culture is James Webb's book "Born Fighting".
Response to MrScorpio (Original post)
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QC
(26,371 posts)dixiegrrrrl
(60,010 posts)QC
(26,371 posts)panader0
(25,816 posts)senseandsensibility
(17,157 posts)I am bookmarking.
Skittles
(153,211 posts)lunatica
(53,410 posts)For those of us who have been around for awhile this is the first election where the "Gay Agenda" wedge issue hasn't come up with the Presidential Candidates. But they're still using the "Mexicans are coming to take your jobs" wedge issue. Good old Donald Trump's first words when he declared were that the Mexicans were coming to rape women. I'm sure he meant white women, because Lord knows everyone knows they're the only ones that count.
Response to lunatica (Reply #11)
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lunatica
(53,410 posts)They now have equal standing with everyone. And they can't say gay marriage has ruined their marriages now either.
intrepidity
(7,339 posts)Thank you for posting it!