My thoughts this week were provoked by Thomas and Enders’ article “Bluegrass and “White Trash”: A Case Study Concerning the Name of “Folklore” and Class Bias.” This article led me to wonder about folklorists and their own understandings of their position, as a member of any particular group and as folklorists. This article made me think of my own background. Honestly, as I type this response, my heart beats overly strongly in my chest and I imagine the regret I will experience once I publish this response. As I read this article, scenes of my own childhood and upbringing in rural Oklahoma sprang to mind. Memories of relatives whispered about my shoulders and those relatives, most of them still among the living, seemed to be reading along with me. John Hartigan, Jr.’s reference about the twig holding up the headlight of the vehicle as a “hillbilly” solution reminded me of own my uncle’s phrase for such work: calls such handiwork “Southern engineering.”
After several days of thinking about the article, a sudden question occurred to me: “How did Zora Neale Hurston feel?” Even though she was writing fiction, she was writing about the place she grew up, the people she knew. Did she feel fear of rejection by those outside of the group? Did she fear rejection by the group due to the value of her education and her acquired position as viewer and interpreter of a culture she grew up in but no longer lived within? Does the folklorist/writer get to talk about their own lived experience or is that unprofessional and non-academic? Where is that line drawn, especially when one discusses the lives and productions of the group from which they sprang?
I grew up in rural Oklahoma with a stay-at-home mother and a father who worked as a maintenance man and bus driver for the local elementary school. Our family would have been classified as “working class” or the “working poor.” But I have certainly heard “poor white trash” applied to our family. This article was interesting and painful to read at the same time.
The “character” of Al was interesting to me on the issue of his experience of the myth of the American Dream. One could possibly argue that by embracing a “hillybilly” persona and “lifestyle,” that Al rejects the American Dream and the American myth of “making it big.” Yet, Al is not resisting the American Dream. He is trying desperately to fulfill it while simultaneously understanding that he has failed that goal and will never achieve it. As the authors’ noted, Al and the other “bluegrassers” never reject that particular American myth. What he appears to feel is a mixture of pride and shame, pride at what he has accomplished and shame at how far from his dream his actual life falls.
I believe the racism and sexism exhibited by the musicians comes from a place of fear and self-loathing. The authors’ hint at this but I do not feel they go into this issue very deeply as it was peripheral to their main topic of inquiry. That fear and self-loathing that leads to racism and sexism allows a positive identity to be created for these “poor working class” individuals.
These men feel so left out of the American Dream, which they staunchly believe in. Otherwise, what would be the point of striving so much and getting nothing in return? People cannot function believing that their actions have no positive influence on their lives. People cannot believe that their poverty is permanent, that their position outside of what is perceived by the whole American culture as “real life” is real. Someone must have stolen what should have belonged to them as white men, be those thieves minorities or women. Otherwise they have failed or the institutions they believe in, a deity or a particular political party, have failed them. The acknowledgement of that failure would leave them rootless, without a framework for the reality that surrounds them. This is not to say that people are clueless. People know that what they believe has flaws and sometimes purposely refuse to acknowledge those flaws because to see those flaws would also reveal all of the other flawed perceptions, in their worldview, in their daily lived experiences.
For example, if I, as a lower class white man (which I am not), agree with affirmative action, then I am acknowledging my own link to those misdeeds of the past and the present. I am acknowledging my own complicity in the continued racism, sexism, homophobia, and other prejudices still so present in American culture. It is in my own self-interest to go so far as to say that these prejudices are not even real but are imaged or exaggerated in the few instances in which they “really” occur. I am acknowledging that I got “something,” in this case white male privilege, that I did not earn. I already feel left out of the loop, like I failed the American Dream test. In order to minimize my own self-loathing, I need a scapegoat, someone to blame and also someone to point out as “less than” my own “wretched” self. I create for myself a positive identity by making fun of Hillary Clinton for not fitting a particular conception of women and by believing that African Americans were “bred” for high level sports capabilities, but nothing else.
We dance around the term “lower class” to the point of denying as a country that we even have one. We all consider ourselves “middle class” because we cannot acknowledge the pain of being “less than” we had hoped for and this also allows us to ignore our own complicity in the situation.
One population not under much investigation in this article, are women within the “white working and lower class”. I have not yet hit upon a term I feel properly encompasses the lived experience of this socio-economic class. As some film scholars have noted about American cinema, women are culturally encouraged to identify with the male protagonist as there is little to no development of the female protagonist in Hollywood cinema as a whole. This cultural identification with the male experience is confusing, at least as I am speaking from my own “white working and lower class” upbringing and general adult life experience. You are put into the position of not only accepting the sexism as described in this article, but internalizing it as truth. Then your own accomplishments are suspect, are “less than” because in order for you to succeed, some man was forced to fail. Or that intrinsically, your accomplishment will always be less than by the value of your gender. So that self-loathing based on your own sex is engendered in you by the culture in order to preserve the supposed “natural” hierarchy you have been raised within.
This article refueled questions I have already been considering, as an academic, as a white woman from the “working and lower class”, and as a person who financially functions within one social-economic class (working and lower class) while working within a career considered “middle class.” By value of my education, I am no longer simply “working and lower class.” But what does this mean for my perception and understanding of my own lived experience? What does this mean for my insights into my culture of origin? What does all of this mean for my position as an academic studying someone else’s cultural productions?
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