Reviled, White and Blue: DU on the Eve of the West Virginia and Kentucky Primaries

McCamy Taylor

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Mon May-12-08 06:04 PM
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Reviled, White and Blue: DU on the Eve of the West Virginia and Kentucky Primaries

�The rest of the country will have to show poor backward WV the way.�

That is an actual quote from DU today. Yes, indeed. Poor, as in poverty stricken. Only Mississippi is poorer. Reminds me of one of the stories from Hard Times Studs Turkel�s book about the Depression. A woman tells about how her employer, a white woman in Texas would always give something to transient Blacks who stopped at the house to beg but would never donate any food or clothing to out of work whites who came asking for help. The maid was the one who would sneak food to the white hobos. The employer treated the white victims of poverty like scum. Even though millions of Americans were in the same boat, when it happened to whites, it was proof of inferior character, a lack of ambition, inbreeding, poor genetic material, God�s disfavor. America felt sorry for minorities that suffered. It felt ashamed of whites that suffered.

America is ashamed of West Virginia, because the people there are poor and have limited access to education. Hell, if they were allowed decent educations, some of them might rebel against their destinies, which is to spend their lives working away in a coal mine where their fathers and grandfathers worked (and died).

I guess I have seen just about everything. People at DU are now justifying Obama�s decision not to campaign in West Virginia, because the blue collar white citizens of that state have one of the lowest education and income levels in the country. (Yes, I have seen people quote the statistics when asked to justify his decision to write off the state) That makes them unworthy of hearing his message of hope. They reckon West Virginians can�t understand words of more than two syllables. Or maybe, folks in that mountainous state are just too damn bigoted to see beyond his skin color. Why, it�s almost as dark as that of the average coal miner after a shift underground.

West Virginia and, to a lesser extent, Kentucky lives at the mercy of Big Coal, which has held all the cards under Bush/Cheney. Coal gets to topple mountains. It gets to kill miners. It gets to pollute waterways. The Martin County Coal Sludge Spill was 30 times larger than the Exxon Valdez spill.

http://www.appalshop.org/sludge/video/Sludge%20Trailer%20Low.mov

It is no wonder that some citizens in Kentucky and West Virginia do not trust the government or men in suits.

Blue collar whites in these states didn�t trust Kerry or Gore, either. That is why the Republicans won there in 2000 and 2004. Since DUers claim that Obama isn�t doing well in this area because this is �the heart of racism country� (actual DU quote from today. Funny, I always thought the heart of racism country was farther south), I guess that must mean that Kerry and Gore were Black, and we just didn�t notice. And Toni Morrison was wrong, and Bill Clinton who won West Virginia and Kentucky wasn�t the first African-American president , he was whiter than all-purpose flour.

All those West Virginians who are not voting for Clinton because they are scared of Obama's half white and half Black ancestry and the ones who are not stupid, even though they did not get to go to college, are probably mad as hell at what they people in the mainstream media are writing and saying about them today. If we could bottle that anger and use it constructively, we might finally be able to come up with a decent workers' revolution in this country.

The white blue collar workers in West Virginia have sure tried in the past.

The Mine Wars of West Virginia in which mine owners hired gunmen to kill strikers and in which the President of the United States eventually sent in armed troops to bust up the final strike show that the coal miners of West Virginia have a lot of reason�s to distrust authority.

http://www.wvculture.org/hiStory/minewars.html

As the intimidation by mine guards increased, national labor leaders, including Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, began arriving on the scene. Jones, a native of Ireland, was already a major force in the American labor movement before first coming to West Virginia during the 1897 strikes. Although she reported the year of her birth as 1830, recent research indicates she was probably born in 1845. As a leader of the UMWA's efforts to organize the state, Jones became known for her fiery (and often obscene) verbal attacks on coal operators and politicians.

Not only did the UMWA send speechmakers, it also contributed large amounts of weapons and ammunition. On September 2, Governor William E. Glasscock imposed martial law, dispatching 1,200 state militia to disarm both the miners and mine guards. Over the course of the strike, Glasscock sent in troops on three different occasions.

Both sides committed violent acts, the most notorious of which occurred on the night of February 7, 1913. An armored train, nicknamed the "Bull Moose Special," led by coal operator Quin Morton and Kanawha County Sheriff Bonner Hill, rolled through a miners' tent colony at Holly Grove on Paint Creek. Mine guards opened fire from the train, killing striker Cesco Estep. After the incident, Morton supposedly wanted to "go back and give them another round." Hill and others talked him out of it. In retaliation, miners attacked a mine guard encampment at Mucklow, present Gallagher. In a battle which lasted several hours, at least sixteen people died, mostly mine guards.

I have written before about the remarkable success which Clinton has shown in attracting the support of the portion of the Democratic base which reveres the memory of Mary �Mother� Jones. Clinton�s campaign style and the years of media attacks which she has weathered make her a modern day Mother Jones like figure in the eyes of many blue collar workers. Some Obama supporters on this board call this �ignorance�, however the fact that they and Obama do not understand the dreams and hopes of this important sector of the American voting public is a mark of their ignorance. Candidates must familiarize themselves with the language of the electorate. To court Spanish speakers, you speak Spanish. To court those who view authority and government with hostility and suspicion, you show yourself willing to challenge the status quo and not back down even in the face of extreme adversity. Unfortunately, Obama�s response to issues like Wright, his willingness to do the gentlemanly or conciliatory thing is not seen as a positive by voters who have little left but their pride. They would actually prefer a candidate who wags his finger at the press and tells them �I will not play your games�, because that is what the citizens of West Virginia has been trying to say for over a hundred years�when they are not being shot at or forced from their homes.

In another thread, I already mentioned that West Virginia was the only state to succeed from its own state�Virginia�and join the Union during the Civil War and agree to end slavery voluntarily. I think that this says something about West Virginia that ought to give those who call the state nothing but a breeding ground for the KKK.

I have read a lot of people in the national press and as many people at DU claim that since West Virginia favors Clinton and since other majority White states favor Obama, and since Obama is Black and Clinton is white, it must mean that West Virginia does not like Black candidates. I have seen no scientific proof for this. Kerry and Gore�s dismal showings in West Virginia and Kentucky after Bill Clinton�s success (and don�t forget, Dukakis won over West Virginia, too, by talking issues) seems to suggest that there is more at play here than race. Character of the candidates seems to be important, too.

There is another way to consider the issue of race, too. African-Americans overwhelmingly support Obama. Perhaps they believe that a candidate who is closer to them ethnically will also understand their needs and wants and will help them more as president. Since the people in West Virginia are just like those in Mississippi----mired in chronic poverty, with no hope of escape since they have no education opportunities and they live in a landscape being destroyed by industrial pollution---perhaps they are also making the mistake of believing that the candidate who appears the most like them will understand their problems and remember them in office and help them. Mississippi and West Virginia need help more than most other states, so both of them select the candidate who wears their face, because they believe that they can trust that person not to turn away. Maybe what some are calling "racism" is desperation.

In that case, by refusing to visit West Virgina, Obama did the wrong thing. A Liberation Theologist would have counseled him that the poor want to be given hope more than anything else. Poor people live with mind numbing soul wracking despair. Had he ignored the polls as Rev. Jesse Jackson did in 1988 and come to the state and said "It doesn't matter if you vote for me. I still want to be your president." Had be given a blockbuster speech on national TV highlighting Appalachian poverty, it would have unified the country.

Why didn't he?