working class studies

Hillbilly Scholars: Studying Poor Whites in Academia

/ Tina Bausinger

morris

While working on my graduate independent study, I wanted to see if I could find evidence of prejudice against female students with Southern accents. It took a lot of sorting through quite a few books on dialect, sociolinguistics and feminism before I found what I think are the best sources around. Because working class studies and dialects link closely together, I looked at both.

Jennifer Beech’s “Redneck and Hillbilly Discourse in the Writing Classroom: Classifying Critical Pedagogies of Whiteness” goes a step further in not only claiming “middle-class” as identity but daring to proclaim oneself as “redneck” or “hillbilly” in an academic setting (172). Finally, someone is using the terms “redneck” and “hillbilly” in a non-threatening way. She also discusses “Writing With and Even as Rednecks and Hillbillies: Critique and Advocacy” which closer approaches the subject of a Southern female student (177). Though not gender-specific, it comes perhaps as close as any scholarship thus far.

Edward W. Morris’s “From “Middle Class” to “Trailer Trash:” Teachers’ Perceptions of White Students in a Predominantly Minority School” touches on a crucial issues: social class based on teachers’ opinion of the “whiteness of students” within a “predominantly minority school” (99). Morris contends that in his experience, white teachers were more racist towards the poor whites than teachers of color.

This is important because it focuses race and classism in the classroom and how being “poor white” is sometimes considered an allowed biased. This is an integral concept because it introduces the topic of inter-racism within the classroom. Teachers were found to look down upon the poorer white students attending the minority classroom without quite being conscious of it. His book An Unexpected Minority:White Kids in an Urban School delves deeper into interesting questions regarding race and perceptions of race in the classroom.

Casie Fedukovich is one of the first (and few) to broach the idea of Southern women in the classroom. Her work “Strange Imports: Working-Class Appalachian Women in the Composition Classroom” really delves into issues of seemingly impossible binaries of student and hillbilly, as brings to light certain issues and strengths working-class women bring to the university. This work, outside of Working Class Women in the Academy, is perhaps most directly relevant to my experience as a southern woman in academia.

By taking a good look at the roots of when the Southern accent became acknowledged initially, this paper attempts to trace its transformation from merely being accepted to being a legitimate mouthpiece for expression for an unrealized marginalized group.

Interested in Morris’s book? Here’s a link http://www.amazon.com/Unexpected-Minority-White-Urban-School/dp/0813537215/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1401827466&sr=1-1&keywords=edward+morris+unexpected+minority

Why is it Okay to Say “White Trash?”

/ Tina Bausinger / 2 Comments

 

The idea of Middle-Class Studies becomes even more prominent in the late 1990s. Writers like Lynn Bloom, in her article “Freshman Composition as a Middle-Class Enterprise” began disclosing their middle-class roots in an effort to focus on the “number of major aspects of social class that freshman composition addresses…that will make them good citizens of the academic (and larger) community, and viable candidates for good jobs upon graduation” (655). She discusses how “middle-class standards” sometimes cause discrimination in the classroom. With the beginning of middle-class studies we also begin to see work regarding working-class studies, which becomes more important to the study of the southerner in the classroom. Again, class is important, because the young, rich sorority girl attending Ole Miss encounters different problems from the working-class mother attending the University of Arkansas.

Soon after, Jim Goad’s The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America’s Scapegoats came on the scene, demanding respect for his kind, and discussing how Southerners are “Othered”. While tracing the history of poor whites to the beginning of American culture, he insists that all Caucasians not be lumped together into one group, and that poor white southerners should not be punished for the sins of their richer forefathers.

Jim Goad, author The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, and White Trash Became America’s Scapegoats, explains:

The stereotypes [of the South and Southerners] aren’t new, just more persistently cruel of late. The Dumb White Bumpkin has always been a stock figure in the American dramatis personae. But fifty years ago the depictions tended toward the benign and comical, from Li’l Abner to Ma and Pa Kettle” (Goad 16).

Goad’s acknowledgement of negative Southern stereotypes such as Li’l Abner pales in comparison with some of the female counterparts on popular television programs.

Goad notes that since the days of the “Beverly Hillbillies,” the stereotypes have gravitated to more dangerous and fearsome (Goad 5). Goad mentions movies such as Deliverance portray poor whites as social deviants who should be avoided, not just generally but at all times (8). If a student is poor and white, from a working class family (as well as from the South), what are the identifiers that spring to mind? By allowing poor whites to be ridiculed, the separation or alienation within the classroom is inevitable. Goad explains:

Referring to “white trash” name calling “What should I call the nontrashy Caucasians? White Gold? The Valuable People? The true profiteers of white imperialism? These are the same class of folks who create negative media images of white trash, the writers who use “redneck” as an adjective. They disparage white trash much as one insults an embarrassingly drunken relative. And in so doing, they shunt nonwhite resentment away from themselves and toward white trash” (32).

Goad’s idea of estrangement of poor whites from their own race is the most significant sort of alienation. Why should they be accepted within the composition classroom, a place where students are taught to communicate for academia, if they are sometimes rejected from their own racial domicile? He continues, “Even within their own race, people seem to need an “other.” It appears impossible for societies to conceive of an “us” without an antagonistic and constantly threatening “them” (32). Within societies, even in a smaller scope like the university setting, the concept of othering and alienation exists.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Redneck-Manifesto-Hillbillies-Scapegoats/dp/0684838648/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1401739515&sr=8-1&keywords=redneck+manifesto

Jim Goad's The Redneck Manifesto

Jim Goad’s The Redneck Manifesto