by David Winner
I’m writing on Halloween, but by the time this is published the election will have passed, and we may even know the identity of our next president. Whether she’s won or lost, I wanted to suggest something that I think could have helped Kamala.
But first a little background. In the Charlottesville, Virginia, of my growing up (the 1970s) everyone appeared to be coded as either white or Black. I didn’t really understand distinctions between Jamaicans, Jews, Bengalis, Asians, Mexicans, Italians, West Africans. All I grasped was that basic racial binary.
While in later years I began to see my peculiar parents’ peculiar brand of racism, they did not express what I understood to be racist sentiments when I was a child. A fellow white kid at summer camp somewhere else in Virginia thought I was “liberal” because I did not hate Black people, but the first real prejudice I became aware of back home in Charlottesville was a pseudo beach club in high school at an artificial lake outside of town that would not admit “poofs.”
In my progressive hippie-dippy private high school, most students were white like me, and most came from middle-class or upper middle-class backgrounds: the children of professors, lawyers, businesspeople. Most of us did not have heavy southern accents or real southern identities. Every member of my core group of friends, my clique as it were, were from those similar backgrounds.
But not everyone in school was like us. There were students with southern accents and markedly different tastes. In clothes, in vehicles, in drugs, but most significantly in music. We moved quickly through classic rock (Henrix, The Who) into punk, new wave (The Clash, David Bowie, Gang of Four) whereas they liked more heavy metal and country rock.
I was not a member of the beach club, but my friends and I were not epithet-free. Our epithets involved class and culture rather than race, gender, religion, or sexuality.
We didn’t directly insult people by calling them r*d n*ks to their face, but we used their musical taste to stick that to them.
The name of a certain Australian band popular at the time never crossed our lips without a broad fake southern accent, implying something very clear about the people in our school who listened to AC/DC. And Led Zeppelin, who we rejected once we got all punk, were called “Red Zeppelin.” While I’m sure our school and our world were mired in prejudices, the R word is the only epithet I remember being commonly used, and classism was the only bigotry that we felt comfortable expressing.
And when I went away to college at Oberlin, where all prejudices were very much scorned, the only southern accent I remember hearing belonged to a guy from Kentucky who got mocked behind his back for it. Having a working-class southern accent meant you were stupid. I’m not making any sort of equivalence between classism/regionalism and racism. Veiled condescending comments about musical taste were not what murdered George Floyd. Rather, I’m trying to make the claim that our type of classism was and is all too easily tolerated by progressive people.
Unfortunately, the major text that comes closest to addressing this sort of classism/regionalism was written by the man who may be our Vice President Elect. J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, according to Silas Vance, an Appalachian Studies professor at Berea College “is woven through with dog whistles about class and race, gender. And if your ears are attuned to those dog whistles, you know exactly what he’s saying. If you’re not, then it can read like a heartwarming rags-to-riches story.”
This writing has only personal anecdotes, and very old ones, but I think they hint at the sort of primal classism among progressive people (“coastal elites”) that the MAGA movement has managed to exploit. Many Americans who may have been called the R word at some point in their lives and Americans who may embrace the term the way members of the LGBTQ community have embraced “queer” have just voted for a rich man from Manhattan who couldn’t be less country if he tried.
White dudes, sure, but quite a few of us already support her, more effective would have been “R*d N*ks for Kamala,” an effort to cut through classism and regionalism to reach a maligned group of people utterly neglected by the Republicans that they tend to support.