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I guess it’s easier to separate yourself from “them”

Rachel has been writing about the kidnapping and torture of a young black woman, and it’s incredibly horrific stuff. I read about this case the other day, and have been holding off posting because it’s so thoroughly repulsive and disturbing that I couldn’t make myself read the articles about it, and I certainly couldn’t formulate any sort of coherent thoughts. Luckily, Rachel has been wading in, and one of the interesting things she’s discovered is how other bloggers are responding to this — by calling the torturers “white trash” and “hillbillies” and referencing Deliverance.

It’s a sentiment I can understand — white people are so disgusted and angry at the torture of this woman that we need to other her torturers to prove that they’re different than us. We need to put racism in a neat box — out there in the hills, with the people who don’t have any class, the people who are unenlightened and snaggle-toothed and live in trailers. Not like us.

It takes a special kind of evil to do what those people did. But it’s not rare. It’s not a symptom of poverty. It’s not about “white trash.” For every one of us who reads these news articles in horror, there’s an upper middle class white college kid somewhere who idolizes Patrick Bateman and thinks that misogynist torture is kinda cool — you know, if you’re classy about it. The focus on the class background of these torturers obscures the larger picture of what they did. It makes it comprehensible — those pieces of trailer trash aren’t quite human, which is why they were capable of doing this. Only subhuman hillbillies are racist.

What happened to this woman was evil. No decent human being should be able to comprehend how people can do what the individuals in West Virginia did. But that doesn’t mean that horrific acts of violence like this are isolated, freakish occurrences. It doesn’t mean that the ideologies which inspire violence are relegated to the hills or the trailers or the homes of poor people. This crime was not caused by the perpetrator’s economic or social status; it was caused by their violence, their racism, their absolute rottenness.

Hate crimes aren’t always this extreme, but they happen with regularity. Shifting the explanation to someone’s economic or cultural background obscures the reality that racism, and race-related violence, permeate every social and economic class in America. Poor white folks definitely don’t have a monopoly on it.


21 thoughts on I guess it’s easier to separate yourself from “them”

  1. There’s a new story up about it from AP and I can’t decide if this little tidbit makes it “better” or worse:

    The victim had a previous relationship with Bobby Brewster, one of the six in custody, Abraham said. He was charged in July with domestic battery and assault after a domestic dispute involving the same woman.

    “She obviously had some sort of social relationship,” Abraham said. “That is based on the fact that she was present at his residence on a prior date.”

    That’s right, kids — he kidnapped, raped and had his family torture his ex-girlfriend. Because, hey, he poked it, so he owned it forever, right?

    I don’t hate men all of the time, but this is definitely one of them.

    (Short explanation of the “No hate crime charges” headline: prosecutors decided to go with the state charges that have a much more severe penalty (up to life in prison) as opposed to the federal hate crime statute, which offers a much lower sentence.)

  2. About white trash:

    eight kids, one illegitimate, two dead in childhood. Father of six absent, father of the younger two molested the oldest stepdaughter. The family are referred to in town as the “buggy ___”, a reference to the assumption that they have lice. They live in two rooms. Not for the children; the family lives in two rooms. They hand-pump water; they heat it on a wood stove. One daughter lost all of her teeth as a teen due to much earlier malnutrition. The oldest children bear the scars of physical abuse from the mother, who had three kids in her teens, and the oldest living son. The family grows some of its own food and the older children scrounge work around town to make up the difference. One of the first six will live to the age of 65; each has a history of substance abuse, smoking, anxiety and hypertension. Two will be convicted of violent felonies. One will beat three wives.

    Not West Virginia. York County, Maine. The second daughter was my mom.

    Thanks for saying it, Jill.

  3. I hadn’t seen Rachel’s post, but this was precisely the point I made. Calling this a hillbilly thing is a way to deny it can happen to – or be perpetrated by – your community, your family, or you.

    As a West Virginian I get really sick of the state being the butt of hillbilly stereotypes, sure, but in this case it’s a more serious delusion so that people can wash their hands of their immersion in social values that encourage violence, hatred and racism regardless of which state you are in.

  4. I really appreciate you writing this. I am from the same city as the victim, and in fact I was the victim of a infinitely lesser crime in Logan County (where this atrocity took place) several years ago at the hands of homophobic methheads. Although I deeply love West Virginia, I don’t harbor any romanticized illusions about the culture that I’m from, and though I was shocked by the scope of this crime, I wasn’t shocked by the specific place that it happened. Southern West Virginia is a damaged place right now, in a lot of ways.

    But in comment thread after comment thread about this incident, people have indulged their completely transparent hatred for Appalachians. It really is stunning… people don’t even make an effort to hide their bigotry, even if they would be more careful about verbalizing their prejudice of other groups.

    Anyway, despite my disillusionment with the latest exercise in unrestrained Appalachian-bashing, I hope this woman’s plight stays in the news a long time. Maybe it will bring some needed attention to hate crimes happening throughout the country, and that the local law enforcement starts taking it more seriously in the future so that some benefit will come out this atrocity to people living in Logan County as well.

  5. binky, do you currently live in WV? I didn’t realize there were so many other West Virginians hanging around here. Okay, two isn’t that many, but for WV it is.

    I finally wrote something about this today, but what can you say? It’s just horrifying. Being in WV, I haven’t been hearing any hillbilly insults, but I’ll add my thanks for writing this post, Jill.

  6. My grandma grew up in West Virginia, and her family goes back for generations out there. When she died, that’s where we scattered her ashes. Apparently there is some sort of WV/Feministe connection…

  7. All things considered, I still had a really hard time believing all this… I mean, not that it happened, but that it could happen. It’s so phenomenally horrific that you almost just assume that this only happens in movies.

    This is quite possibly the most horrible thing I’ve ever heard of…

  8. I should add, a large part of my family is lower-middle class to below the poverty line and white. There is a definite current of racism and a lack of general education, and though most of them subscribe to some form of racism, I can’t imagine them engaging in or being any less horrified by this than I am.

    It does take a certain sort of person, but that person can come from any background.

  9. It does take a certain sort of person, but that person can come from any background.

    That’s exactly right.

    And, yes, I live in WV, as does a bunch of my family, though I grew up elsewhere.

  10. My family isn’t quite WV, but we’re from around there – quite literally. East TN, East KY, North Carolina. We’re from all over that area.

    We have our share of family members with inexplicable politics, but nobody that would perpetrate this sort of horror.

  11. Good post. I made a similar comment on another website a few weeks ago regarding reactions to the white antagonists of the Jena 6. You can’t dismiss racists as all backwater rednecks or crackers or other-derogatory-term-of-choice; doing so simply sweeps the extent & pervasiveness of the problem under the proverbial rug.

    While I hope the perpetrators in this case receive the most extensive punishment possible, which apparently will only happen under state rather than federal laws, I’m disappointed that they can’t also be prosecuted for a hate crime. I think the classification of ‘hate crime’ exists in large part to acknowledge the problem of systematic bigotry against various groups. Its exclusion in this case is a shame.

  12. I live in WV near Morgantown and a lot of people I talked to at work today were outraged by this story. Not all people from WV are like that most of my neighbors and coworkers are good people just trying to make it in the world. I am not a native WV resident but I have come to love the state. People need to know that violence exists everywhere.

  13. You know, I completely hear that. Horrific sexual and racially motivated crimes happen all over.

    Having spent part of my childhood and early adulthood in the mid-south, and then having lived a lot of other places, I also know there are micro-cultures of Bad Shit all through that part of the country that I haven’t seen — to that degree — elsewhere.

    It’s cowardly to try to shift racist violence and sexual violence and all kinds of fuckedupedness onto “hillbillies” or “white trash.” It’s also not helpful to pretend that there aren’t regional pockets of certain flavors of vileness — or that there aren’t regional variations in the way black women, for example, are treated when they’re walking down the street. Those regional variations aren’t an excuse for anyone else (read: Northern, predominantly urban, liberal regions), and they’re not a very pleasant thing to think about, but if you think they don’t exist, you’re not paying attention.

    Put another way, the KKK has a very strong presence in parts of New England. That doesn’t mean that you’re not going to have a harder time, on average, growing up black or Asian or Hispanic (or queer) in most of West Virginia or Kentucky than in most of Connecticut. It’s a question of scale and locally dominant attitudes.

  14. On a very high level of abstraction, “this” can happen “anywhere.” Rape and abuse happen everywhere. Rape and abuse can take forms that are this extreme.

    But it’s not that simple.

    I live in a very rural state, in an area that literally has the lowest population density in the first world. I worked for a DV agency very recently–effectively, as agency liason to the police. In rural areas, the “donut” effect, where the disadvantaged are concentrated in the center of populated areas, occurs in reverse: the poor end up in concentric, progressively poorer rings surrounding centers of population.

    Tax revenues from the population centers pay for city services, diverting funds from county services directed at the outlying, poverty-stricken areas. This includes cops. This includes anything designed to bind together communities.

    Which is why, twenty miles from where I live, there is a (former) logging community with nearly a thousand people and no businesses except a single bar. I mean that quite literally. There is no gas station. There is no grocery store. There is no hardware store; no tackle shop. The buildings are there, but they’re boarded up; empty. Many (even most) people don’t have cars. Even if they did, they couldn’t evacuate the town to move toward economic opportunity: no first and last month’s rent; no deposit.

    The politicians interested in dealing with poverty don’t represent places like this. They promote solutions that fail. Policing strategies that identify “hot spots” and ignore the backcountry. Centralized welfare offices that are imposible for the poor to reach. Welfare standards that demand that people without cars or, literally, any prospects of a job, get one. Economic development strategies that ignore the poorest parts of America.

    This was not part of an undifferentiated epidemic. Atrocities committed with total impunity result from one of three things: privilege, brilliance, or neglect. These were not privilged people. This was not a brilliant crime. This was the fucking fact that no one paid any fucking attention until someone was being raped and tortured for weeks.

    And, yes, that absolutely has something to do with the fact that it was way out in the middle of West Virginia.

    — ACS

  15. One of the ridiculous things about using the term “white trash” to describe the perpetrators of this crime is that the term itself is racist. It implies that “white” trash needs to be distinguished from the “other types of trash,” namely minorities.

    Horrible term.

  16. SHS, precisely. “white trash” doesn’t have any meaning outside of the context of “white people who live like [insert disfavored group of poor nonwhite people]”)

    Not a lot of people choose extreme rural poverty and disfunction, and to mock people for being born into it or trapped in it is not very progressive.

  17. What binky and ol’jib and a few others said. This could have happened anywhere–the fact that it happened in southern WV just makes it easier to dismiss it, because obviously any civilized people wouldn’t do this kind of thing.

    I grew up in Logan County (specifically, Buffalo Creek, I now live in NW Ohio, but Man is always going to be home), most of my family still lives in the area, and there are a lot of racist, misogynist people around there. And yeah, horrible shit goes down, and I would only be slightly surprised if I heard of something like the Jena situation happening in the area, but this is is difficult for me to wrap my brain around. And everyone I know personally is just as horrified by this as I am.

    I am seriously sick of the Deliverance stereotype that is constantly perpetuated about Appalachia. It isn’t like messed up racist assholes don’t exist in every other part of the country as well.

  18. I grew up in rural east Texas, which is the western edge of hillbillitaria. Both sets of grandparents made their livings through agriculture, although one set quite accidentally made a lot of money at it. I really think we on the left completely drop the ball when dealing with lower-class white people. Yes, many of them have really stupid ideas, but so do uneducated people of every other ethnic group. It’s part of that “uneducated” bit. I have no problem condemning the people who did this for being the monsters they are, but I’m not going to blame their ‘monsterness’ on their address or income. Progressives have to create a world where most people behave well out of a kind of inertia, and where things like this take a truly extraordinary amount of effort. To do that requires that we recognize that all humans of all social classes and backgrounds are easily capable of evil, so that we have to create institutions and systems that reduce that part and encourage the good stuff. This is a lot more than the conservative idea of “lock ’em up,” which really isn’t all that effective anyway. I hope if they’re proven guilty all of these people do long prison terms and that their victim gets all the assistance she can use. Still, it’s really nice to read someone calling out prejudice even against acceptable groups.

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