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From the heart (of “Whiteness”)
A paper presented at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, 2013 by Jonathan Grove
of the University of Washington, Tacoma.
Original title as presented:
Unmarked and unheard: Voices of Working Class White Men in an Appalachian
Borderland
Abstract:
Much research has explored the application of intersectionality theory across marginalized racial
and gendered populations, and the intersections of a privileged and marginalized identity, such as
the masculinity of men of color and of gay men. Further, to a more limited degree there is some
literature regarding masculinity and marginalized religious groups and masculinity and class.
Literature on Appalachia focuses on class from a labor perspective, and whiteness and
stratification within whites. Yet, race, class and rurality, particularly white marginalized group
experience, has not yet been systemically analyzed using intersectionality theory. Using
participant observation and narrative analysis, I examine the confluence of whiteness,
masculinity, and (working) class experiences within rural Appalachia to gain a comprehensive
view of the mechanics of social power, to learn about the politics of advocacy, and to allow
coalition building across marginalization, which I believe would result in greater progress toward
equity.
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Because I am one among many who have known pain inflicted upon us for another's gain; yet I
am also one among many who has the power to change that for others.
Before my words arrived, everyone here knew significant portions of my experience - not
in the particular, but rather the abstract. Here before you stands a white man. Now that you hear
my voice, perhaps you’ve already begun searching the nuances of my pronunciation to discover
the source of this accent; certainly, but not quite, Southern. I can tell you that speaking about
“whiteness” with an accent identified as Southern presents at once, two very real feelings for me.
First, is terror. Terror that I might in some way visit pain on one of you - or myself, as the history
of voices like mine speaking about “race” is not a pleasant one. However, the second feeling is
one of great possibility as it is the challenge to “Whiteness,” which I will discuss here today, that
offers a different future. I submit to you that these two feelings, as well as the rest of my story
offers an example of what many may call ally development.
To be sure, the population named in the title of my presentation describes me and most of
those with whom I was raised1. Further, the work described here seeks not only to ensure those
voices are heard, but in doing so also present the ways in which we are - and desire to become -
partners in struggle, thus changing the culture more rapidly. Because we have known the pain of
inferiority, and especially because many of the systems that perpetuate such hierarchies claim us
as beneficiaries and supporters, we have tremendous power to interrupt it by rejecting these
systems. Even further, together we can usurp the forces that divide and conquer us all through
shame, self-hatred, fear, and violence by rejecting what Foucault calls “the kind of individuality
which has been imposed on us,” (see Sandoval p.164) and embracing what Sandoval in
1 Original title was Unmarked and unheard: Voices of Working Class White Men in an Appalachian Borderland
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Methodology of the Oppressed calls “revolutionary love” - or what I was raised to know as
Christian love, of a sort rarely practiced.
Certainly, no one should ever have to feel inferior and the great irony is treating another
as inferior infects you, such that no one can feel whole so long as the cycle continues. As
Sandoval quotes from Fanon’s discussion of the “Negro Problem” in Black Skin, White Mask, it
is not a,
“…’problem of Negros living among white men,’ but is, rather, the problem of ‘Negros
exploited, enslaved, despised by a colonialist, capitalist society’ that is ‘only accidentally
white’ – any race can utilize and inhabit the categories of supremacism. The race that
does so creates a rhetoric-for-being that binds (in varying forms) all citizen-subjects.
Such enslavement includes the white man in a white-man’s state, Fanon writes, for he has
become ‘enslaved’ by his own expressions of ‘superiority.’ Thus, the speakers and the
rhetoric of the dominant order must be transformed...” (p 129)
As described by Fanon, “whiteness” is the trap that too often creates within the subjects
of this study the schizophrenia Alice Walker described when she wrote “We are oppressor and
oppressed... To attempt to function as only one when you are really two, or three, leads, I
believe, to psychic illness: ‘white’ people have shown us the madness of that” (Sandoval, p 194).
This is at the heart of Lilla Watson’s well known quote, “If you have come to help me, you are
wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let
us work together.”
Moreover, the previous quote is critical to the aforementioned ally development, which is
important to create systemic change. Given that “white,” working-class, Appalachian men have
been socialized to experience their raced and gendered selves as their only hope of attaining
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social position, and thus personal value, they approach race and gender from a personal place.
While any “moral” person will be concerned with the struggle of an “other,” meeting them in
this same personal-validation space is critical to full investment in change that benefits all
involved. In contrast, power resides in perpetuating the conviction that what benefits the othered
raced or gendered group, produces the direct inversion for me; thus my personal validation is
lessened. However, by “interrogating whiteness” we cannot help but grapple with our
relationships to both power and the pain of marginalization. Thus the powerful “WIIFM” - the
“What’s in it for me” I learned working my way through college in sales - is here, what we all
long for; validation and love.
Before I proceed, let me explain a bit more about myself, which might illuminate why I
believe both voice and WIIFM are central to liberation. Coming from a family that I experienced
as apathetic at best about “higher” education, I did not readily accept that my path would lead
through college as this was not only an investment of finances (which is not insignificant in
itself), but signified a profound departure from everything I knew and which was valued in my
familial and social contexts. People like us do not go to college or move to the city, and doing
both was to express that “I’m better than ya’ll” and thereby ostracize myself from family and
friends at home. Clearly this demonstrates a significant internalization of class and rural
marginalization, which is then converted into an underdog pride that maintains this norm.
Indeed, when I started college in the Washington DC suburbs, my younger brothers (who have
never gone to college) started referring to me as “Yankee” though I never left the state. This was
said as a somewhat comical slight, but in that area the term connotes both despicability and when
used in reference to a Southerner, implies treason. While my childhood dream of “escape” came
true through great effort and courage, I can never go “home” again as I have crossed into a
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world apart from the solidarity that comes with rejecting the “elitism” of middle-class
intellectualism. My escape was more complete than I had anticipated.
Now liberation might be an odd concept to return to here, yet it is important to note that
the most profound experience of my college career was when I was introduced to the liberatory
potential of feminist deconstructions of masculinity. In retrospect that liberation was so
incredibly important to me because I had been seeking freedom from the constant pursuit of
validation on terms that were defined by others and changed based on the (cultural) context. Note
here that the structure that is defined for and by us simultaneously, is the very structure of
domination, both patriarchy and whiteness in this case. Through feminist critiques of masculinity
I found an intensely uncomfortable challenge to self-define, and thereby liberate, my gendered
self. Simultaneously, and critically also for the first time, I was offered language and solidarity
around my class experience. Later, I was challenged to consider how “othered” others might
experience the parts of myself which profit from systems of inequality. Perhaps most importantly
here, these readings helped me negotiate power and minimize my own pain. This in turn helped
me approximate an understanding of how I, along with those “othered” around me, experienced
power differently.
Although a white, heterosexual, former football (and tennis – shhh!) player, raised
working-poor in the Southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, the eldest of my European
mother and Mennonite father’s three sons, it is because my liberation also resides there that I call
a college campus Women’s Center “home.” In addition, though I went to college with the
intention of becoming an FBI agent, the experiences above led me to decide that sexual and
intimate partner violence prevention and gender equity education was my calling. Both careers
were predicated on ensuring that there would be less pain in the lives of people around me, and
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in my present work, the power of how I am perceived is sadly a powerful tool to offer other
young men similar opportunities for liberation, and young women a safer world.
As alluded to at the outset, I am very aware that I present in a particular way and that as a
result others ascribe certain qualities to me. Further, I learned early that I could insulate myself
particularly because people will see me immediately as a white man, but know only of my
“place” if I speak, and my class of origin if I describe it. Thus I can easily “pass” in a way others
cannot. This is to say that while I did intentionally learn to minimize my accent so I could be
seen as “intelligent”, I have always had a degree of control. In fact, I have regularly used my
accent to offer a challenge to those in power who are unable to see how this “good ‘ol boy” in
front of them could possibly advocate for “those people.” I, and others like me, am afforded a
powerful strategic location. Indeed, as a dear friend put it, I have the potential to be “a spy.” We
can be the resistance that is not recognized and like a life-giving cancer within, corrupt the
infrastructure of domination.
However, in order to make positive use of this, those like me must grapple with our own
dialectical relationships with, in, and within power structures. Sandoval offers a description by
citing Foucault’s work on “refusing fascism,” or the ways in which the state’s apparatus of
power “...categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own
identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to
recognize in him” (p 163). Sandoval continues (p. 164):
"Before the citizen-subject's birth into the social world, the intersections of race,
culture, sex, gender, class and social powers are already locating in order to provide a
particular space to hold that individual, to pattern the kind of subjectivity it will be
permitted. From the moment of it's birth, the citizen-subject becomes regulated, branded,
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and shaped, the first world ideological apparatus imbricated through its subjectivity in a
novel, and, we might say, more total way than ever before. First world citizen-subjects
take pride in their "freedom" of movement and speech, their activities trusted as "good
citizens" - replicated the social order and its hierarchizations, usually without the
necessary imposition of directly brutal state force...."
Therefore, in the places in which we reside in power, we are entrusted to perpetuate that
power through our “freedom.” Yet it is exactly the opposite. This sense of self is exactly that
which traps us, and our un-critical identification with that category - as white and/or male -
reinforces the trap. Thus as James Baldwin said, ‘As long as you think you’re white, there’s no
hope for you.” This is not a simplistic call for empathy. While clearly hierarchies of power
negatively impact even those who benefit, and certainly those whom it seeks to eradicate from
the social landscape, even empathy can stand in the way of resistance. If the dialectical
relationship with power has not been grappled with, but the individual seeks to empathize with
those “othered” from their beneficial subjective location, their efforts will be thwarted by the
unavoidable shaping of their interaction in power.
If we are to assume that liberation implies an existing constraint, and that one’s embrace
of their subjectivity is a lock on the broader system, we must both accept our position and yet see
the system as unnatural and harmful, rather than beneficial. Further, having self-reflectively
accepted this, the security we previously felt becomes experienced not as our true “natural” self,
but rather the “straight-jacket” Katz described (Tough Guise, 1999). Thus, owning the
positionality given us, yet striving to exist outside those limits becomes our method of liberation
and both withdraws our support from and weakens the infrastructure of power. It is at this
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juncture that empathy and coalition building might start to occur, but only because we wrestle
with and embraced the dialectic of self within power.
Method
Therefore, when approaching this research topic, it is imperative to seek such
destabilizing stories of white men in the literature as well. The juxtaposition of situating white
men in Appalachian working-class experience is just such a potentially undermined site. As
Wray’s 2006 “Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness” title, and my
own experiences suggest, this space might offer promise, and initial reviews of the interviews
offer the complexity one might hope to see in such complicated positionalities. Given this, I
determined that listening to the voices of the complex human beings involved in this study would
be required in order to uncover the workings of power/oppression and more importantly the
opportunities for liberation in their lives.
The methods I chose do not lend themselves to generalizability. Generalizations to the
entire Appalachian region do not benefit individuals who wish to be heard, and has historically
been the source of problematic stereotypes about the region. As a result, the methods I chose
were highly reflexive participant observation and unstructured interviews, along with some
archival research.
Immediately upon my first foray into the field, the critical importance of participant
observation to this study became clear. Whether, a native of the area or not, and especially
having crossed over and become a “Yankee” college-boy, gaining trust as a researcher was next
to impossible. While my history and accent gained access to hours of conversation, at the
slightest whiff of motive - particularly academic - the conversations generally ended. Often this
abrupt end came with renewed questions about my family and place such as “what’d you say
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your name is?,” “Where are your people from?” Moreover, even requests to interview friends
and relatives were denied, though informal conversation over a beer followed such a denial in
several cases. Thus, I was quickly reminded of the centrality of both geographic and social
community, family reputation, trust, and the profound distrust of outsiders and “experts” in the
literature (Keefe, 2000; Russ, 2010; Walls & Billings, 1977) and in my experience. As noted, I
am very much aware that I am included in this demographic and this is also my story. Therefore
along with the fact that any study confers a great deal of power to the researcher, the reflexive
component to the participant observations is designed to address my participation in the
constructions of the research context. Further, doing research within the community in which I
was raised was an ethical choice as this location is not someone else’s “place,” and yet was a
strong empirical choice.
True to the central purpose, I specifically chose to conduct unstructured interviews to
provide both structure and freedom for subjects to tell their stories as they understand them. I
hope that as a result, the participant’s experience is more like the familiar community building
exercises of storytelling, which necessarily lack the power-differential inherent in an interview
setting. Further, being mindful of this power differential is important because the interviewee’s
reflections on who they are, the direction of the conversations, subtleties in the duration and
location of pauses and check-in phrases describe their view of the world. Therefore, being
conscious of my influence throughout the interviews was critical to ensure that the story was not
shaped by my expectations.
Conclusion
As I know that people continue to be harmed by those structures, and I see the
tremendous potential for change that would benefit entire communities - if not regions - I am
compelled to pursue the following goals in my work:
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1. Ensure that people's stories are heard and valued, particularly using my ability
to engage those who have a great deal of social, and therefore potentially political,
capital. In this case, white men.
2. Create a space for the exploration of our own stories, interrogation of the social
forces that delimit and shape our world experience, and be an example that personal
liberation and true community exist just beyond those strictures. Thus, the freedom to
whole-heartedly, and without restraint, share our selves, joys and challenges, find
validation and accountability with all those in the community - and thereby have
solidarity in struggle.
3. Do my best to ensure that there might come a time when children won't ever
have to learn how to negotiate shame, embarrassment, and the denial of self-love that
comes with it... So that they never know anything but that they are valuable and loved.
References
Jhally, S., Ericsson, S., Talreja, S., Katz, J., Earp, J., Rabinovitz, D., & Media Education Foundation.
(2002). Tough guise: Violence, media, and the crisis in masculinity. Northampton, MA: Media
Education Foundation.
Keefe, S. E. (2000). Mountain identity and the global society in a rural Appalachian county. Paper
Presented at the Center for Ethnicity and Gender in Appalachia’s National
Conference, Huntington, WV, March 5, 2000. Huntington, WV.
Russ, K. A. (2010). Working with clients of Appalachian culture. Unpublished manuscript. Retrieved
4.29.12, from http://counselingoutfitters.com/vistas/vistas10/Article_69.pdf
Sandoval, C. (2000). Methodology of the oppressed. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Walls, D. S., & Billings, D. B. (1977). The sociology of southern Appalachia. Appalachian Journal, 5(1,
A Guide to Appalachian Studies), pp. 131-144. Retrieved from
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40932198
Wray, M. (2006). Not quite white: White trash and the boundaries of whiteness. Durham: Duke
University Press.
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