Slate--Here Comes the Hillbilly, Again: What Honey Boo Boo really says about American culture.

[antigone382]

17. To me, shows like that, "The Real Wives of..." "bad girls club" etc.

are playing on stereotypes of calculating, materialistic, irrational women without virtue or substance...I suppose urbanity could play into it as well...

But the point I'm making is not just on the entertainment appeal of shows that target a particular social group, although I think that is a worthy topic of discussion. It's that the specific hatred and bigotry extended towards people in Appalachia has some very real and very catastrophic effects, and has had those effects for a very long time. The massive, virtually unregulated resource extraction that has occurred in Appalachia over the last century and a half has been largely enabled by the attitude that these people were backwards, their homes and cultures were not worth saving, and even that they were "better off" because of the "progress" brought by the coal camps--outright land theft, underpaid and dangerous jobs, "education" and "healthcare" that served only to keep the people ignorant and sick, and of course, inescapable servitude through the issuing of company scrip and the violent suppression of any attempts at workers' organization.

This kind of oppression was virtually indistinguishable from slavery, and it has had the same kind of lasting effects that slavery had--including ignorance and a distrust for most institutions beyond the family, and perhaps the church. And while the more egregious violations have been outlawed (note that those laws did not save the 29 miners at Upper Big Branch, just as they did not save Judy Bonds), the reality is that the coal industry has barely changed in all these years--only finding new ways to keep the money rolling in while they rape the land and destroy the people, and meanwhile, the rest of the country gets a few laughs from a Deliverance reference here and a "reality" TV show there.