The South & Being Poor

This one is a little preachy-- I was disturbed the other day by this talking head guy on one of Andrew's news shows who caustically called the red states "parasite states" and implied that nothing at all good could ever come out of them. His attitude was painful to watch, and I wondered how much someone like that really knows about the places he is talking about. Probably very little. I remember a girl explaining somewhere (maybe a blog?) that some friend of hers from Paris, watching the little cities go by on the train outside of either Chicago or New York, thought all those little cities were "suburbs" of the bigger city. Not even knowing what those places outside the window were like. How someone like that would react to a train ride through Mississippi boggles the mind.

I think that most of the people who read me are either from northern climes or more urban areas, even if they now live in quiet places. I was thinking a little bit about the South, growing up here (mostly) and living here now. Texas is the South, even though it is also its own place, with a very different sort of pride and attitude, it is very different too. (More on that another time!) I was really frustrated when all those maps came out after the election implying negative things about the South because a large portion voted Bush because growing up here, I know that there are lots of variations here. The funny thing is, if you look at USA Today's map that breaks the vote down by county, you find it wasn't nearly that clear cut-- lots of places in the north voted Bush too. But that's not the point of this post....I digress. :)

I was actually born in Illinois-- my mom is from there, and my Dad is from New York. When I went to Buffalo last year, I was amazed that everyone sounded like my Dad-- I had never realized that's where his accent came from. I always thought it was Chicago, cause that's pretty much where he lives now. But fairly early in my life, from job moves, we moved south to Kentucky; then, when my parents split, all the way down to Mississippi. We also lived in Louisiana, and Florida (the northwest portion, which many call "Lower Alabama"-- which is true in some ways and not true in others. The beach areas, and areas near military bases, are a lot less rural than the others.) So I pretty much grew up in the South.

Being really poor in the South is pretty rough; a lot of people don't realize exactly how difficult it can be. At least when you are poor in an urban area, there are resources to help you, people who are concerned that you don't miss out on things like parks and culture, free museum trips with your school, etc. Programs like Boys & Girls clubs. In the more rural south, there's just nothing. You have to make your own amusement-- and it is pretty hard to do. Especially when the nearest place to "do" something is miles and miles away, and there is no public transportation at all. It took me almost an hour to get from home to school on our school bus in Louisiana. And that wasn't even to a city, but a small town.

And the schools. Jeeez, don't get me started on that! Because the areas in general are filled with poor folks, many of whom do not own their own property, the taxes that pay for teacher salaries are just not there. So there aren't very high salaries, which of course does not attract a large amount of the most ambitious of teachers most of the time. So the schools pretty much are there as a form of babysitting. When I was in second grade, I was given a reading comprehension test by some teachers. I was reading at a 12th grade level (remember-- I was in second grade!)-- the teachers looked nervously at each other and said (and I am quoting because I remember this!) "Let's just stop there." They didn't want to know if I could read better than that cause maybe they would have had to have done something about me. Like put me in gifted classes or something (which I never managed to get-- always missed the testing dates cause I was moved around so much). That would have required work, and for a poor kid like me, there just was no advocate. I had this same thing happen when I was older, in high school. No one ever informed me (guidance counselors? what guidance counselors?) that because I was as poor as I was, and had grades as good as I did, that I could get help. With the help of a job where I could buy my own clothes sometimes, or borrow from friends, I "passed" as middle class, and so everyone assumed that any help I needed I would get from my family. I even remember that this one school secretary was openly hostile to me once when I tried to apply for a special gifted summer program, because, I guess, she didn't know me, she assumed that I was not the right sort of kid to do this thing. Because of her attitude about it, I never applied; I was too embarrassed.

Anyway... the point is not to talk so much about myself but about the gulf and the resentment that has grown up for many people because of this, which talk of the "red states" being parasites on the "blue ones" only makes worse. Even middle class folks don't quite get it. If you grew up never really having to worry about food, or you had a family that helped when times were tough, if you got "new school clothes" every year and all the school supplies you actually needed, and you were never evicted and homeless because of non payment of rent or had your power turned off because you couldn't afford it, or went to a food bank cause you had no food or money, you weren't really poor in the way that some people are. (You don't have to have had all of those things, although I did).... You might not have been rich, but you had something more than the majority of the rural poor have. My mom was, most of the time, too proud or too tired to go apply for welfare, so though we could have gotten help, we never did. And this is true of a lot of people in the south.

Again, back to the point-- this is why when you see the most idiotic southerners on TV, they almost always have that deep accent, and no idea what the world really looks like out there. They haven't ever seen a city larger than the nearest small town, and many of them don't even care to. And there isn't much chance that anyone will ever hear the other side of the story, the suffering and the struggle, because most of these folks do not become writers or TV people. Many of them hardly make it through the rotten school system.

There is a resentment born of people who never have had anything, including hope, but it's not as simple as just racism. They may have been told "anyone can be president" but they certainly knew that they weren't going to be. They never believed that Bill Gates' success could be theirs cause Gates at least grew up wealthy enough to have a chance to go to college. The main chance a poor kid from the rural south gets, if they can't play football like a god, is to join the military. They see people on TV talking about how bad they are, how bad and ignorant and backwards the South is, how enlightened the urban areas are, and they just learn to believe these things are true. And they never get a chance to learn anything else-- even the schools are so poor that the books are ancient, and torn up, and the teachers bored and exhausted and not that wonderful to begin with.

It's pretty rough. The main thing that saved me was the public library, and the fact that my mother grew up middle class and inspired different ambitions in me. So when I am around people in academia, where as far as income growing up goes, I represent a full 1% of the people in grad school (as far as people from my background go) and people talk about how poor they really were, I always feel like either laughing or crying. Most of the people who make it to grad school were middle or upper class. It's just the stats, folks, I don't make them up. And these are the people who teach the teachers... they have no clue what those classrooms I grew up in look like.

This isn't a "Poor me, look how much I've accomplished" contest. At the same time that I say these things about the rural south, I also say that there is a fierce pride, and many really good people, of all races. Just as I can't say "all northerners are XYZ" and know it to be true, it's important to not think of all southerners as ignorant rednecks who would rather have "sexual relations" with a farm animal and take the hard earned tax money from the hard working Urban areas to buy moonshine.

Anyway. Just a rant about something to make you think. I know this is probably true of a lot of rural areas-- the rural north, as I've seen it, isn't as different as people like to think it. We were in a bar in Washington state once & Andrew & I observed that you could pretty much pick it up and drop it in lower Alabama and not notice much difference. But the biggest difference is that label. Southern. So many people automatically assume certain things about you if you say you're from the South, based on a history at least 30 years old, that there's an added stigma attached. And many times, that's just not at all fair.