J.D. Vance’s rise to the GOP ticket has opened up scrutiny into the junior senator’s past and roots. Before he entered politics, Vance entered the public spotlight as the author of a best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. While often marketed as an authentic glimpse of Appalachian working class life, what Elegy really offers is a portrait of a man whose roots and life path have been decidedly different from those of Appalachia’s working poor. Like the GOP itself, Vance’s claims to represent Appalachia’s poorest don’t hold water. In this episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Beth Howard of Showing Up for Racial Justice and Hy Thurman, a former Young Patriot, discuss the radical history of Appalachia, and how progressives can bring white workers in this region and beyond into a multiracial working class movement for social justice.
Studio Production: David Hebden
Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Marc Steiner:
Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner, and it’s great to have you all with us. Now, J.D. Vance likes to play an Appalachian. But if you read his book, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, it’s more like an attack on the place he claims he’s from. He says he speaks for the working class, well, the white working class, but everything he stood for is really dismantling the unions and against what workers fought for from the Battle of Blair Mountain to the Mine Workers Union to communities throughout Appalachia and what they’ve fought for and achieved for all these decades.
So what’s happening in Appalachia, that was once the fifth column of the Confederacy, the Heart of the Union movement, fiercely independent, a place with a deep culture? What can it tell us about where America is headed? Today, we talk about J.D. Vance and the very struggles of the people of Appalachia with folks who know something about it. Beth Howard was born and raised in Eastern Kentucky. She’s the Appalachia People’s Union director of Showing Up for Racial Justice, who came up with a slogan, “Rednecks for Black lives”, and grew up in a rural white community in Eastern Kentucky, which was also director of Southern Crossroads. And Hy Thurman is the author of Revolutionary Hillbilly: Notes from the Struggle on the Edge of the Rainbow, co-founder of the Young Patriots, which was a radical group in the ’60s in Chicago that was in coalition with the Black Panthers, Young Lords and others, now living and writing and organizing in Huntsville, Alabama. And I must have a disclaimer saying we’re friends. Got to put that in there.
Hy Thurman:
Yes.
Marc Steiner:
Known each other for many, many moons, and good to have y’all with us.
Hy Thurman:
Glad to be here.
Beth Howard:
Yeah, great to be here.
Marc Steiner:
So where do we even begin? Let me get a viewpoint on the man who’s running for vice president and claims to be one of y’all.
Beth Howard:
Yeah. J.D Vance is a grifter, he’s an opportunist. He is in the pocket of Peter Thiel and big tech. I am an Eastern Kentuckian, and he brought in a total sham business that was fueled by a venture capitalists called AppHarvest, which was supposed to be the answer to our economic woes, which was giant greenhouses growing tomatoes, and it turned out to be a total sham. He also has holdings in Purdue Pharma, and he has done nothing except use old hillbilly stereotypes to promote eugenics and to try to blame working class White people, people in Appalachia for the problems that the ruling class has created, such as the overdose crisis, poverty and more. And so he’s a very dangerous person.
Marc Steiner:
So one thing I want to ask you about what you just said before we turn to Hy, you said eugenics, what do you mean?
Beth Howard:
Yes. So when we read excerpts from Hillbilly Elegy, which a friend just shared with me to refresh my memory, the things he talks about in there are that Appalachian people are genetically pre-disposed to be lazy, that we don’t want to work. And this is the same kind of rhetoric that’s been used against other oppressed people, against Black people, immigrants, against the Jewish people. So yeah, to say that there is just something genetically inherently wrong with us and to completely disregard the systemic issues from his friends in the ruling class that has led to what has happened for generations to us, but to also get us to blame ourselves, to try to convince us that we’re the problem and so therefore we shouldn’t fight back. So yeah.
Marc Steiner:
And Hy, you like the guy, right?
Hy Thurman:
Yeah, we’re big buddies, I tell you. No, well, my take on J.D. Vance is he’s an opportunist, just like Beth was saying, but he’s not a hillbilly. He wants to be portrayed as this savior hillbilly to explain to people what the South is really about. He spent very little time actually in the South, he was in Ohio. And I thought his book was terrible. And even the disrespect for his family that he has in the book. I in no way would throw my mother under the bus like he did, even though she has a lot of mental problems, had a lot of drug addiction, let’s don’t use that to capitalize just so we can advance. And so I saw that as what he was doing. And he’s supposed to have this great struggle of poverty. I didn’t see any poverty that he went through. That was a life of luxury as far as I was concerned in the way that I was raised and the way a lot of people in the south are raised. But people won’t believe anything. They’ll say, “Here’s a dude…”
And by the way, the reason that I used hillbilly in my book is because he used hillbilly in his book. And I wanted to show that there was a difference between people, hillbillies, you might say, and how one’s gone to the right and one’s gone to the left. And both of us had some similar experiences. He went to school, got an education. I went to school, got an education, had to fight for it. And we were both raised in single parent homes, but I didn’t see him anywhere as having this struggle that my family would have and a lot of the other poor people in Appalachia have.
And my problem with people who sort of fall in line behind him is that they have no real leaders. And we’ve been put down for so long that there actually are some of the people that will identify with the oppressor because they have to. And my take on him is he’s just a false, phony, misogynistic, racist that’s trying to win over the hearts of other people that will tend to believe him. Because Trump didn’t create the situation of racism and misogynistic. He just brought it down to some people because they were thinking it.
And there’s some bad education in the South where a lot of people still believe in the Confederacy. And so not to get off track, but there’s some mentality there that some people still believe in that because they’ve been overlooked for so long by the system and used by the capitalist system and taken advantage of all the way through the coal mining, the timber industry, and just poverty. And so we as organizers or we as socialists or we as revolutionaries must counteract what J.D. Vance is doing and what Trump is doing. And I think we’re starting to do that.
Marc Steiner:
I want to get your ideas and your thoughts and analysis about what has happened to Appalachia, both politically and otherwise. Let me start with you, Beth. Appalachia has kind of been environmentally destroyed, the coal industry is not what it was, there’s been a lot of oppression going on inside of Appalachia. But why do you think that it seems to have turned right in terms of politically?
Beth Howard:
Thanks for the question. It’s an important conversation. And one of the things I like to talk about within this context is, I’m from Kentucky and so I’ll speak as a Kentuckian, a lot of people will say Kentucky is Trump country. We’re a quote “Red State”. The facts are that last year in the governor’s race, which was a very high profile race for our state, we almost, I think it was like 37% of the people voted. And so we are a low voter turnout state. And I think part this conversation is, why are people fed up with politicians? And I think that goes to the root of some of this, is that we have been a place where people for generations, including politicians, have come in and made promises that they never delivered on. And they have sided often with the fossil fuel industry, with big pharma, which led to the overdose crisis. And so a lot of people are disillusioned, but also a lot of the laws in our region really suppress voters.
And so for example, in Kentucky, polls are open 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM for very many years. We just now have early voting, and there are so many people who are not allowed to vote because they might have a felony on their record or any number of things. And so they really are working to suppress our votes. But also, I hear a lot of people when I’m door knocking for my community organizing work who will say, “These politicians come around once a year because they want my vote, and I never hear from them or see them again.” And so I think part of this is that progressives, liberals, people from center left, have often written off Appalachia as this kind of lost cause, as not a place worth investing in. And when we do that, we do that at our peril.
We are kind of writing off this entire region and place where, as you named, throughout history, when we look at uprisings in this country, we are one of the places who have had the fiercest, most militant worker uprisings. And we are a place that we are not exclusively White, which is a really important conversation to lift up that we aren’t just White people, we are diverse. At the same time, we are a majority White place in Central Appalachia. And so for a state like Kentucky that’s 85% White, me as a White organizer and other White people, we have to take responsibility for organizing our folks and to make them a better offer than White supremacy. And that better offer, I believe, has always been and is an invitation to fight as part of the multiracial working class.
I always say we have to be out here talking to people and organizing people, and we have to talk about race specifically because race will always be used to divide us. And so when we have poor White people, those in power tell us to blame Black people, to blame immigrants, now to blame trans kids and that they’re the reason we don’t have anything to keep us from looking up at them. And so I just say, we have to talk about race, we have to talk about trans rights, we have to talk about Palestine, because it’s to our peril that we don’t. And the far right has no problem talking about race. They have no problem talking about their agenda for hurting trans people for imperialism. And when we set it out, we just give all of that territory within the narrative, but also the geographical power building territory to our opponents.
Marc Steiner:
You said a lot there. Let’s take the places you both live right now in Appalachia in different parts. You’re a little further north in Kentucky and you’re further down south back in Alabama, Hy. So how do you begin to organize that? How do you begin to organize this multiracial coalition that can turn Appalachia around politically from the right to fighting for economic and racial justice in America? How do you think you do that? Because it’s been written off really. Appalachia is always getting written off. Well, let me stop there. I’m curious how you both think you begin to do that. How does that happen?
Hy Thurman:
Well, in Alabama it’s very difficult to organize anything on other than a conservative basis because of the history of Alabama. But there are groups of people who are really fighting for the rights of the people here. And one of the things that we’re doing is developing similar Rainbow Coalitions that existed. And we’ve organized a second Rainbow Coalition, which is a nationwide coalition made up of various different racial groups. We also, here in Alabama, what I do is I run a school which is called North Alabama School for Organizers, which we just went national in it, but we’ve been running this about six or seven years, and we’ll run various classes for organizers, to train organizers, to get information to people who want to organize, who want to change.
But one of the most important aspects of this organizing is you generally have to have something to offer people. And sometimes the poor people don’t have the opportunity to attend classes, and especially the homeless, working a lot with the homeless. And so we’ve developed what we call survival programs that we had with the original Rainbow Coalition. We have a Homeless Construction Coalition, which we get organizations together to literally build structures for the homeless. That way we can figure out more what they need and therefore try to get them into the voting block when voting comes up. We have a free automotive clinic in which we fix people’s cars so they can get to work, get to school. Because a lot of these folks are going to lose their job if they can’t get to work. Some folks lose their apartment because they have to fix their car.
We also have another aspect which is we’ve gotten into the entertainment field called Blues to Bluegrass. And what we do is get musicians together to do benefits and to reach people in the community. And so what we want to do is to give people the information that they need to go organize in their own community, to be self-determined toward progressive change. And a lot of people don’t know how to do that or the organizers need additional materials. And we have what’s called fireside chats, which we sit down. And we’ve had probably 50, 60 fireside chats with individuals across the country where organizers can go in and get information just off of what we had taped, recorded. So we do that as well as supporting other causes in the state and all over the country. So being involved in the Democratic National Convention coming up in Chicago, we’ll be working with the Poor People’s Army and taking just thousands of people there to-
Marc Steiner:
So you’re heading back to Chicago?
Hy Thurman:
Yeah. And we just have to keep educating people, that’s all. And we have to get into the rural areas to talk to people. They’re lacking a lot of services that people might get in the city. We’re talking about healthcare and other areas. We’re talking about organizing food pantries, food programs and things like that. So you really have to get to the people where they are and what they need. Instead of talking about it, you have to go out and do it.
Marc Steiner:
So I’m wondering, Beth, to bring you back in here, if you look at what’s happened in Appalachia from north to south, but especially the south, [inaudible 00:17:04] come in and kind of really ripped off the place, raked the land over, left people in poverty. And so you’ve got a place now with poverty and drug addiction, the economic collapse, healthcare systems falling apart. So Beth, I’m curious how you begin to organize that into a movement, to really stand up and to pull it out of the grips of this kind of racist right-wing movement that has gotten a stranglehold on the place over the last 20, 30 years.
Beth Howard:
Yes, absolutely. So much showing up for racial justice. And SURJ is a national organization bringing White people into fights for racial and economic justice. And I am the Appalachian director for SURG. And we take a lot of our approach from inspiration from a brilliant Black woman organizer, Linda Burnham, who after Trump was elected in 2016 said that poor White people are suffering, and if we are not speaking to their suffering, we know someone else’s, and that’s the farce.
And so what we are doing in our organizing, I’ve been a community organizer for 18 years, which is hard to believe. In some ways, I’m always like, let’s play the hits, let’s go talk to people, knock on doors, pick up the phone and start to listen to people and say, “What’s going on in your life?” And Marc, you named some of the things we hear, that, “My loved one died from an overdose. I can’t afford my healthcare. We can’t afford housing. We can’t pay our bills. We can’t keep food on the table.” And so we take those issues which are economic issues usually that are coming up and we connect on those economic issues across race and across gender, across age. And we start what we call a shared interest campaign around usually an economic issue like housing, which is one of the key issues that we’re organizing around in Eastern Kentucky right now. And through that work, we build a multiracial coalition.
So I helped start a crew in Eastern Kentucky called the Kentucky People’s Union, and I’ll use them as an example of how we do this. So we started out doing a listening project. They identified housing as a campaign they wanted to run. And through that they keep bringing in more and more tenants and more and more people in the region who have a stake in housing. And this coalition is now multiracial. Our first meeting, we were like 13 of us, and 12 of us were White people. A year later we had 50 people coming to our community meeting. They’re multiracial. It’s intergenerational. We have a lot of young trans leaders with people who are older and maybe have never had any significant relationship with anyone who is trans in their lives. And so through this economic issue, we become transformed and our hearts and minds change. Our world gets bigger and our vision gets more beautiful every day.
And one of the things that we did to really bring White people along around race in Kentucky People’s Union is we’ve used our history. So learning about the Young Patriots and Hy’s work, but also learning about, as you mentioned at the top of the call, the miners and the Battle of Blair Mountain, this amazing multiracial group in 1921 of a thousand miners, immigrants, Black miners poor White miners who came together as the Redneck Army and wore these red bandanas around their neck to show their solidarity. And so we tell that story and we actually wear red bandanas. That’s our organizational symbol. It’s a way to call White people into this fight for racial and economic justice without shaming them. We’ve had this kind of White privilege approach in the larger conversation about whiteness and race for a very long time, and it’s a very hard sell to knock on a poor White person’s door and say, “You’ve got White privilege,” right? They’re going to slam the door.
Marc Steiner:
“Excuse me, I know you’re privileged because you’re White.” That’s insane. That’s always bugged me, in all my years as an organizer, it just makes me nuts. Yeah.
Beth Howard:
Absolutely. And so when we talk about the Young Patriots or the story of the red bandana in that symbol and what those miners did, that calls people into their dignity to say that we have this incredible history of being on the right side of things, and here’s this invitation to do it now again when the stakes could not be higher. And so that’s what Rednecks for Black Lives was, which was a viral essay I wrote in 2020 to call us into our best selves, for one thing, to know that there were so many people like Hy and myself who were already on the right side of this thing. Many people are unorganized, they don’t have a campaign to belong to. So I think it’s offering an organizing campaign for those folks who are not organized yet but who’s already with us. And then it’s creating an invitation for people who are more on the fence or who might be being courted by the far right to have another way of being a working class White person in Appalachia and to tap into this history.
Marc Steiner:
Before we close out and we come back to Hy as well, you really want to revive the term redneck and own it.
Beth Howard:
Yes, absolutely. So similarly to how Hy said he strategically reclaimed hillbilly and named his book Revolutionary Hillbilly, yeah, we are reclaiming redneck. It has multiple origin stories maybe. But one of the thing we’re most proud of and one that has been so hidden from us because it’s so dangerous is this story of the Redneck Army. And so yeah, we are reclaiming it. We’re being loud and proud. And poor White people, poor White Southerners, we’ve been rowdy. We’re a little bit ready to scrap, we’re a little rebellious. And so we don’t want to get rid of that, but we want to use that for the right reasons. And so I think really tapping into that multi-racial working class solidarity is the way to put it to good use.
Marc Steiner:
That’s really important. Hy, you were about to say what? I can hear you about to say something.
Hy Thurman:
Well, I have a quote here that really hit home to me when I was writing this book, and I found it. It’s called Rainbow Pie: A Memoir of Redneck America. And it says that the United States has always maintained a White underclass whose role in the greater scheme of things has been to cushion national economic shocks through the disposability of their labor with occasional time off to service bullet magnets in the defense of the empire. So the system needs us. They have to have us. They don’t want us to get ahead, you see? But at the same time, they don’t want us to realize that when Beth goes up and tries to talk to poor people, they want those poor people to say, “I’m not poor. I’ve got my big screen TV, I got my phone, I got my car. And the guy down to the street who might own a company or something, he’s got the same thing, he’s got a little bit better things, but I got what he’s got, and therefore I’m not poor.” When in actuality they are poor because it goes all the way back to the ’70s when Wall Street and the government and everybody else became convinced that they could give poor people credit. And they’ve used that as a weapon against the poor people since then.
And that’s part of the problem, is convincing people. And this is where the Poor People’s Campaign that’s going on now has a lot of trouble, because people do not want to admit that they’re poor. So we have to do a lot of work, a lot of convincing because of the connotation that’s been put on that word over the years. Whereas in the ’60s and ’70s, people said, “Yeah, well I’m poor, let’s go with the Poor People’s Army Campaign and let’s go to Washington. Let’s go do this.” You don’t see that now.
Marc Steiner:
So as we conclude, I’m very curious about a couple of things. One is how hopeful you are that things can shift in places like Appalachia. I was thinking about years ago, my experience with you all in Chicago and Resurrection City, Hy, back in the ’60s, the Rainbow Coalition, my own organizing in South Baltimore in the early ’70s where we brought Black and White working-class communities across the line together to fight against slumlords and inside unions. I’m thinking about the Mississippi timber workers, which brought Black and White workers together in Mississippi. I remember that. But those things came, organizations didn’t remain. Where do you both think the future lies and how you organize something across racial lines to put up a fight for a different kind of America in places like where you all live? And Hy, I’m going to let you go first very quickly and then slide right over to Beth and let her take us out, for the day, anyway.
Hy Thurman:
First of all, I think we can’t be afraid to approach people. I see people that’s afraid to approach people and talk to them about it when they may have different views, and this is exactly where we need to be, is talking to these people. I was at a rally where some high school kids came with Trump signs, and I’m like, “Okay, we need to talk to these kids. Let’s go talk to them.” So a couple of us grabbed some Poor People’s Campaign literature and went over and talked to them and handed it out to them. We have to educate them. We have to have more people getting into Appalachia. And we have to develop other people in Appalachia, as Beth was saying, as organizers.
But the Appalachians, the Appalachians have to make their own decision. I can’t make decisions about the Native Americans, the Black or Hispanics. I can only try to get involved with the White people and try to change them. And I’ve got to understand that that’s where I’m coming from and that’s what I have to do. So I see a future eventually, and I’m never going to give up on the dream that we can make changes there and we can have equality there and the people in Appalachia can have the same equality as the rest of the people in this country. So one time we had talked about, in the Young Patriots, to separate Appalachia and making its own state.
Marc Steiner:
Right, I remember all that. Yep.
Hy Thurman:
Yeah. And I still see that all the time, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. But what I’m saying is I’m a revolutionary, I don’t think the revolution is going to happen in my lifetime because of my age, I guess, but it could happen in my grandkids’ lifetime or something like that. That’s what I’m hoping, because we just have to pass on the buck. We just have to keep doing it.
Marc Steiner:
We can’t stop. And Beth, let me let you help us round this out. One of the things I was thinking about was J.D. Vance and his Hillbilly Elegy as opposed to a hillbilly revolution, a hillbilly rising up, which is some of the stuff I think you’re working on.
Beth Howard:
Yes, absolutely. I think for me, how do I keep that vision and hope alive, I love my people more than anything in the world. I couldn’t be more proud to be where I’m from. And I think that for lots of us, when we hear people talk about us, they’re usually looking down on us. And it’s usually not us having the microphone or a voice to be heard. And I think what I want to do and what I think can help us have this Appalachia uprising and this beautiful future is to treat people with kindness, to see our dignity, and to create opportunities for us to organize and to be involved.
And I think about my own family. So I’m the daughter of a small family tobacco farmer and someone who worked in surface mining and strip mining, my dad. My mom was a grocery store clerk and then a factory worker. And someone asked me if my dad was in a union and I said, “No, this was the Reagan ’80s. They were broken by the time my dad was mining. But I know he would’ve been a union miner.” And my friend who’s a union organizer said, “Oh, well, he was unorganized.” And that really stayed with me because nobody came and knocked on our door. No one came to his workplace to organize him or organize my mom [inaudible 00:30:22] factory. And what might our lives have been like if that had happened? And so I have kind of made it as one of my purposes in my life, along with other people in this region, is to give people the opportunity, to knock on their door, to call them and invite them into something beautiful, not in spite of being an Appalachian, but because they are, because we have such a high stake in a multiracial working class winning this world we deserve.
Marc Steiner:
That’s beautiful. And that’s a great way to close out our conversation. And we’ll continue this conversation because I think the work you’re all doing in Appalachia is really critical to the future. And Beth Howard, it’s been a pleasure to meet you. And really, I’ve been reading your stuff and I’m excited to have more conversations.
Beth Howard:
Yes, absolutely. And so grateful to be here with you, Hy. I owe so much to Hy and the Young Patriots, so I want to say that in public as much as I can.
Marc Steiner:
And I echo that. Hy Thurman is a dear friend and a comrade and a brother. Man, I’m glad you could join us today as well. And you’re not going to stop fighting until you draw your last breath. That I know.
Hy Thurman:
That’s right because I don’t look at myself as being old, I’m just chronologically gifted, so it just keeps being given to me and I just keep taking it. But I would like to say that, Beth is very special to me. And wow, I’m not sure, you’re my tutor. Okay?
Beth Howard:
We got each other.
Hy Thurman:
Really. That’s right. And Marc, you’re a great guy. It’s good to always talk to you.
Marc Steiner:
Always good to talk to you. So Beth Howard, Hy Thurman, thank you both so much for being with us today on The Marc Steiner Show. Let’s keep the struggle going and we will continue our conversations together, and maybe time to take a trip down through Appalachia and get some stories done.
Beth Howard:
Love that. Thank you.
Marc Steiner:
All right, thank you both so much.
Hy Thurman:
[inaudible 00:32:14] power.
Marc Steiner:
Once again, thank you to Beth Howard and Hy Thurman for joining us today, and for all the work they do organizing cross-racial working class solidarity in Appalachia. And thanks to David Hebden for running the program today and audio editor Alina Nalek and the [inaudible 00:32:31] Kayla Rivara, making it all work behind the scenes, and everyone here at The World News for making the show possible. Please let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mssattherealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you Beth Howard and Hy Thurman for joining us today. And we’ll bring you more stories about the fight to build interracial workplace coalitions in Appalachia and across the country. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.
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