Divide, Ridicule, Repeat - Who Benefits from Rural Stereotypes
My family goes back seven generations in Appalachian Virginia. My son, born and raised here, makes it eight. In some ways, he is a stereotypical country boy, just like his friends. But unlike him, almost all his friends have been raised in families that have voted Republican for decades. In fact, our home county ranks historically as the most Republican in all of Virginia, having voted for neither JFK nor FDR.
I often use my son’s friends and their families as a barometer for gauging declarations I read about conservative rural white folks, especially young white males. Such was the case with the publication, White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy. Released in 2024, the authors promoted the more sensational aspects of their research on numerous morning talk shows, with captions proclaiming “White rural voters are the most dangerous and anti democratic group in the United States.”
In one forty second soundbite, they accused white rural voters of being racist, xenophobic, anti immigrant, and anti-gay, ending with the edict that white rural voters were the most likely “to excuse or justify violence as an acceptable alternative to peaceful public discourse.” All leading
to their conclusion that white rural rage was the greatest threat to American Democracy. At the time, the city-based authors received a good deal of backlash from Appalachian and rural scholar/advocates for their use of tropes and stereotypes to sell their book. The same strategy, incidentally, used by J.D. Vance.
On this year’s anniversary of the January 6th insurrection, Appalachian author, John Peace, came at the “white rural rage” trope from a different direction. He studied statistics from the Department of Justice about the rioters charged with attacking the Capitol. What he found was that nearly half of those charged were from urban and suburban areas in Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, New York and California, with only “a thin slice coming from real rural counties.” He also found that 254 had been to college, with doctors, nurses, police officers, real estate agents, and small business owners in the mix. One was even an emergency room surgeon.
The idea of white rural rage as the driving force behind the downfall of democracy is just one more example of the perpetuation of stereotypes that cast rural folks as the "other” and further separate and divide the rural working class from our counterparts and natural allies in the cities. For anyone agonizing about their class status while reading this, I’ll pass along the soothing reassurance I once received from a seasoned working-class organizer, “Do you work?”
Historically, the Appalachian hillbilly stereotype was created in the late 1800s by “local color” travel writers to sell their stories to urban readers. Shotguns, moonshine, bad teeth, and dirty overalls were all part of the image. The timber, coal, and railroad industries soon adopted the
negative caricature as justification for their abusive exploitation of Appalachian landowners. It worked. By successfully casting their victims as ignorant, violent, and backward, as “other,” the corporate profiteers were given societal sanction to deceitfully extract natural resources that then reaped them huge returns in urban centers.
The resurgence of the hillbilly/redneck stereotype since 2016, and its expansion to encompass all rural people, is once more being used by the economic and political oligarchy to divide and exploit the rest of us.
I taught Appalachian Studies for several years at Virginia Tech University and the question I posed to my mostly northern Virginia students was, “Why are Appalachian people the last socio-economic group in America that it’s still seen as okay to stereotype and ridicule?” Think the 1960’s TV show, The Beverly Hillbillies, the 1970’s movie, Deliverance, comedians like Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy, and more recently, the book and movie, Hillbilly Elegy and the Netflix series, Justified.
The tropes that used to be reserved for southern “rednecks,” and Appalachian “hillbillies”, have now been extended to all rural dwellers, especially those who dared to vote for the Republican Party in 2016, 2020, and 2024. The news media, liberal politicians, urban authors like those who
wrote White Rural Rage, even mainstream entertainers like Taylor Swift, have helped to strengthen negative rural stereotypes in recent years.
But now, instead of the timber, coal, and railroad barons benefitting, we have tech billionaires and corporate giants who wield massive control over information and commerce. And just as in the late 19th century, it is to the advantage of these new titans to keep the rest of us separated and blaming each other for the price of gas and groceries, as in, “You got what you voted for.”
I’d like to think we’ve learned something in 150 years. Instead of falling for the same old divisive ploys, perhaps it is time for rural and urban folks to band together to forge a truly inclusive movement across race, class, and political differences as a first step towards creating a better future, both economically and politically, for all of us.
Meredith Dean is a community and political organizer, author, and the National Director of Community Works, a program of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative (RUBI) working to overcome deep mistrust and partisan polarization in rural communities.