West Virginia: What's race got to do with it?

By: Rebecca
Published On: 5/18/2008 1:11:24 PM

I promised my friend who grew up in West Virginia that I would write this. She was very distressed at the way the media short changed her home state on the race issue after the last primary. Here's what she relayed to me:

In general West Virginians are very relaxed when it comes to race. In fact the KKK came to the state once and tried to get a foothold but they were booted out of the state. Below are listed her four reasons that West Virginians resonated with Hillary Clinton rather than Barack Obama. These comments and views belong to her and are based on her knowledge of the people of West Virginia.

1.West Virginians prefer brand names as opposed to new things.
2.West Virginians have a large number of women with dominant personalities and a large number of men who like them.
3.West Virginians like politicians who visit the state and shake hands with them because they think their state has been maligned for so long. This makes them feel that they are really important after all.
4.West Virginians are problem people. What this mean is that they see the world as a place where there are always problems and that the best you can do is fight, but few really expect to find solutions to the problems.

Personally I can't vouch for the first three points, but my friend Teddy elaborated on the fourth point eloquently. She says they people of West Virginia originally came from Scotland and Northern Ireland. The Scottish were placed in Northern Ireland by the British as a buffer between them and the Irish Catholics. The most feisty Scottish were chosen and a culture was created where it was laudable to always fight. However, a dark sense of resignation accompanied this because there was no real hope of winning.
Teddy also made the point that there are some other nationalities in the state are very racist. I won't mention which ones out of respect for any here who may share the same heritage.

My West Virginia friend also pointed out that another manifestation of the problem orientation of West Virginians is the type of music they have created over the last century. She just finished writing on book on the topic which is being published by Mississippi University Press. It's the type of music where a man's truck breaks down, his wife leaves, and his dog leaves. In the next song he has a new truck, wife, and dog and the same thing happens again. She points out that things rarely get better in this music because these people have a hard time visualizing solutions.

I call this music "crying in your beer music". I think anyone can see why the idea of change would be very hard to embrace for these people. It's just part of the culture.

The Republicans and the media have found it useful to create a huge race issue out of the West Virginia primary in hopes of extending the life of Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy". However I think the "Southern Strategy" is on life support these days. As they say in West Virginia "That dog don't hunt no more." (At least it seems to be on its last leg.).

Comments



Then there's the economy (Teddy - 5/19/2008 10:16:21 PM)
and the fact that West Virginia's natural resources, mainly coal, primarily provide good dividends for a few outlanders, and only hard, ill-paid jobs for the locals.   Appalachia has been in a Depression for generations, and the Scots Irish simply endure, valuing self-reliance, hard work, and what seems to me to be a continued belief in predestination lingering from their Presbyterian roots in Scotland and Northern Ireland. In any case, I think your analysis is on target for most of Appalachia (which is what West Virginia is), so Hillary struck a chord with her hardnosed scrappiness, and Obama struck the mountaineers as an elitist, just as Hillary said he was, and elitists are scorned. In other words, their vote for Hillary was more of a class matter than of color (read Webb's book Born Fighting for a description of that culture and its inclusiveness, its acceptance of any newcomer no matter of what color, who is a good neighbor and buys into their philosophy).