Another day, another TV show capitalizing on stereotypes of poor Appalachians

[antigone382]

This isn't the first thread I've posted on this subject and it probably won't be the last. I am a resident of the impoverished mountain south, and my neighbors are the kinds of people frequently made into objects of mockery for things like poor housing, poor healthcare, poor diet, and lack of education and opportunity--all of which are signs of oppression, not inferiority.

The fact that a majority of voters in many of the regions with this kind of poverty happen to be Republican is no excuse for using the trappings of poverty as a tool of mockery. Not all poor Appalachians are Republicans by a long shot; and regardless of political belief, nobody should be discounted based on their socioeconomic status or regional origin. Over-the-top stereotypes of people who live in trailers or have missing teeth are fundamentally classist and anti-democratic.

Unfortunately at the moment I don't have as much time to respond to other posters as I would like, so I apologize in advance for my lack of participation in any discussion.

From http://www.salon.com/2013/01/07/whats_so_funny_about_being_poor/

America’s favorite joke is anything but funny

MTV's "Buckwild" joins a long tradition of skewering "hillbillies"
By Alexandra Bradner

On the night before the premiere of their new MTV reality show “Buckwild ” — which aired last Thursday — Shain Grandee and Kristina Shae Bradley appeared as exotic guests on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.” Grandee offered Fallon a glass jar of deer meat. “Killed it myself,” Grandee explained. “We skin it and process it all at the house and everything.”

(snip)

Grandee and Bradley represent something important — but not the people of West Virginia or Appalachia writ large, many of whom are similar to the kids of “Buckwild” and many of whom read the Economist, frequent gay bars, and play racquetball, just like many of us. Grandee and Bradley represent the two faces of exploitation, the ways in which someone without any cultural capital can respond to media bullying. When pushed into the dark reaches of a corner you had no idea you were entering in the first place, you can reflexively embrace your caricature, as Grandee is doing, or fight against it, in the tender, vulnerable and, ultimately, false hope that the bully will take you on as a peer. On “Late Night,” Fallon brought up the ridiculous captions that appear on the show whenever Grandee speaks, so MTV’s cosmopolitan audience can access this alien creature. Bradley laughed and said, “Sometimes it’s even hard for me to understand him.”

Cultural persecution and its social psychological effects are nothing new to the hardworking and hard-suffering people of West Virginia, who have lived through the same internal split in the past. Before “Buckwild,” there was “Saturday Night Live’s” “Appalachian Emergency Room,” a comedy routine in which blood spurts from the wounds of rural mountain people rushed to the E.R. with occupational injuries. (Chopping wood to warm the children in your unheated house can be quite dangerous … and hysterical!)

Of course, we all know why. Suffering people are so entertaining. There’s nothing more humorous than decades and decades of exploitation at the hands of the coal and natural gas industries, both of which have ravaged the landscape and choked its people in miserable jobs, hundreds of dark miles beneath the Earth’s surface. We love to chuckle at insurmountable educational challenges, like the fact that, in 2007, only 17.3 percent of people age 25 or over in West Virginia had a bachelor’s degree, the lowest rate in the nation. The lack of basic healthcare in some regions, the aging population, the weight management issues, the diabetes, the heart disease, the mesothelioma, the routine chemical spills, and the poisoned drinking water are pretty funny. Household incomes from 2007 to 2011 that are $13,000 lower than the national average and 17.5 percent of the state’s population below the poverty line — riotous. And what’s more laughable than, as of 2010, the ninth-highest teenage birthrate in the country?

[Fawke Em]

1. K&R

What's often overlooked, too, is that most hillbillies aren't dumb and most of them were against slavery. They understood the plight of slaves because they were also imprisoned, if not by chains, but economically.

[corkhead]

2. What's your problem. You too can invent a duck call, become a millionare, and have your own TV show

[VanillaRhapsody]

3. I have seen previews of the show...

those are NOT poor Appalachians.....if that were the case...much has changed about what we call "poor" these days. Just because kids talk like that and live in the South doesn't make them poor. I am from the South and I know that poor kids cannot afford the types of recreation these kids seem to be able to afford.

[Archae]

4. When you think about it, even "The Beverly Hillbillies" was a good portrayal.

The "backwoods hicks" usually ended up getting the better of the "city slickers"

And they were better people usually.

[R_Flagg_77]

5. I live...

In the Appalachians, more specifically in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

I've sat down and watched the Beverly Hillbillies, The Andy Griffith Show (where I live, I can pretty much spit across the state line and watch it hit the town the show was based on), and the Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia. To be totally honest with you, while I have yet to watch this Buckwild show, the Wild and Wonderful Whites are very, very honest portrayal of lower-class West Virginians. I have met people like that in West Virginia, and that is why I do not go to West Virginia. (I do have some funny stories involving absurd amounts of alcohol, blizzards, and automobiles on the interstate as a result... You know if that counts for anything.)

Not all of us mountain people are like that, most of us have a certain semblance of class. Many of us have regular jobs and nice homes; and some of us are even wealthy. Yes, poverty is rampant here in the mountains, it has been since most of the factories and mills closed in favor of foreign labor. A few factories are still here or are coming back due to the efforts of a local wealthy businessman, who initially shipped those jobs to China but after seeing what sort of junk the ChiComs make, decided to reopen in the US again.

The next county over is one of the poorest in Virginia; and it, as well as my own county, have a high percentage of our population on food stamps and other forms of assistance. It's a bad situation, but in time I hope it'll get better. We're more than willing to work, and while there are a fair amount of high school drop outs, it's pretty common for most of the younger generation to attend at least community college so we have a semi-skilled workforce at a minimum. Unemployment is very high, this has always been an factory/mill oriented area, and like I said, most of them are long gone. Still plenty of family-owned farms, and a few local corporations that are involved with the agriculture industry, but those jobs rarely open up.

We don't mind being the butt of jokes, we just don't like getting the short end of the stick economically.