After the first election of Donald Trump, the discourse got stuck on “he won because of racism/misogyny,” mostly because the Democrats had spent the campaign saying no one would vote for Donald Trump unless they were racists and misogynists.
I'm familiar with the area Amanda Jones worked in/came from. Livingston Parish is the most conservative part of south Louisiana - an evangelical/protestant island in the middle of a majority-Catholic region, and one of a few longterm Klan strongholds in the majority-white "Florida Parishes" which are surrounded by much more diverse parishes (David Duke settled just east of where she was in the 1970s; Rod Dreher's Grand Wizard dad is from around that area, one of my dad's old friends grew up there and told us that as a kid the local department store used to literally sell Klan robes in a secret dressing room in the back). It's not just conservative - its really, really, really conservative. There have been lots of unredacted FBI files published on this region in the last few years about how deeply the Klan controlled the place for a very, very long time. I mean, this is a region that has put lots of terrorism and work into keeping out anyone who isn't a white protestant and is now broadly reflective of that effort both demographically and politically.
I would be surprised if she weren't a Trump supporter knowing where she's from - but I am also less convinced if she thinks everyone in that region is a conservative right-winger merely because of "ignorance". She sounds like someone who is maybe scared to interrogate the values of the community she worked in and why she was so easily targeted, and/or why people she knew so easily turned against her, for what are fairly normal, moderate opinions on intellectual freedom. Like: Livingston Parish is not this one place that is 95% white in the middle of the southern "Black Belt" because of "ignorance"! What's tiresome to me is not so much that this is another book largely for a liberal audience by a moderately liberal person, but that this is sort of coating over a much deeper problem - that these hotbeds of Jim Crow era, Civil War era racism are still here, still full of the kids of the people who made them that, and not being effectively challenged or acknowledged by their more reasonable citizens. It is by no means a massive leap of logic to assume her tormentors & persecutors were the children of Klan members, quite literally (no, not metaphorically or figuratively - not "Nazis" in the sense of "Trump is a Nazi" but "Klan child" in the sense of "Dad was a regular member of an established chapter of the Klan"). Maybe there's something else here to be gleaned about how histrionic rhetoric about all this has made it easier in some ways for actual fascist/terroristic threats to hide in plain sight, especially of the objects of their scorn are hesitant to identify them for what they are.
there was something Robert said in another comment thread, about Vance and writers who “go to great lengths to disassociate themselves from the places they came from and the people who live there, in an effort to establish themselves as members of the elite” — and I think That Librarian is kind of the other side of that. The refusal to look at the dark side of where you come from, to pretend at having a kind of loyalty in a folksy kind of way. This is what politicians do all the time, of course. Both are ultimately only really interested in talking to the “elites”, though. Those outside the actual community.
I'm familiar with the area Amanda Jones worked in/came from. Livingston Parish is the most conservative part of south Louisiana - an evangelical/protestant island in the middle of a majority-Catholic region, and one of a few longterm Klan strongholds in the majority-white "Florida Parishes" which are surrounded by much more diverse parishes (David Duke settled just east of where she was in the 1970s; Rod Dreher's Grand Wizard dad is from around that area, one of my dad's old friends grew up there and told us that as a kid the local department store used to literally sell Klan robes in a secret dressing room in the back). It's not just conservative - its really, really, really conservative. There have been lots of unredacted FBI files published on this region in the last few years about how deeply the Klan controlled the place for a very, very long time. I mean, this is a region that has put lots of terrorism and work into keeping out anyone who isn't a white protestant and is now broadly reflective of that effort both demographically and politically.
I would be surprised if she weren't a Trump supporter knowing where she's from - but I am also less convinced if she thinks everyone in that region is a conservative right-winger merely because of "ignorance". She sounds like someone who is maybe scared to interrogate the values of the community she worked in and why she was so easily targeted, and/or why people she knew so easily turned against her, for what are fairly normal, moderate opinions on intellectual freedom. Like: Livingston Parish is not this one place that is 95% white in the middle of the southern "Black Belt" because of "ignorance"! What's tiresome to me is not so much that this is another book largely for a liberal audience by a moderately liberal person, but that this is sort of coating over a much deeper problem - that these hotbeds of Jim Crow era, Civil War era racism are still here, still full of the kids of the people who made them that, and not being effectively challenged or acknowledged by their more reasonable citizens. It is by no means a massive leap of logic to assume her tormentors & persecutors were the children of Klan members, quite literally (no, not metaphorically or figuratively - not "Nazis" in the sense of "Trump is a Nazi" but "Klan child" in the sense of "Dad was a regular member of an established chapter of the Klan"). Maybe there's something else here to be gleaned about how histrionic rhetoric about all this has made it easier in some ways for actual fascist/terroristic threats to hide in plain sight, especially of the objects of their scorn are hesitant to identify them for what they are.
there was something Robert said in another comment thread, about Vance and writers who “go to great lengths to disassociate themselves from the places they came from and the people who live there, in an effort to establish themselves as members of the elite” — and I think That Librarian is kind of the other side of that. The refusal to look at the dark side of where you come from, to pretend at having a kind of loyalty in a folksy kind of way. This is what politicians do all the time, of course. Both are ultimately only really interested in talking to the “elites”, though. Those outside the actual community.
My gratitude for your work increases with each encounter.
And yes, Dawn Powell.
"A TIME TO BE BORN" is always my recommendation as a gateway to her work, introduced to me decades ago by Gore Vidal's reminscence and apprreciation.
Again, I thank you.