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11 INTERSECTIONS ON THE BACK ROAD CLASS, CULTURE, AND EDUCATION IN RURAL AND APPALACHIAN PLACES Van Dempsey Introduction This chapter, as it focuses on rural and Appalachian contexts, is about white within white intersectionality, and about how power and privilege are enacted within whiteness. It is also about the juxtaposition of complexities of culture within rurality and Appalachia and the monolithic treatment of that context from outside observers and critics. This analysis comes out of an intersection of race, class, and place to, as Kimberlé W. Crenshaw recommends, “. . . account for multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social world is constructed” (n.d., p. 2). It is also, according to Crenshaw’s work on intersectionality, “. . . a project that presumes that categories have meaning and consequences” but with the caveat that the “. . . most pressing problem . . . is not the existence of the categories, but rather the particular values attached to them, and the way those values foster and create social hierarchies” (p. 13). Finally, Crenshaw’s thesis legitimates the position that critical acts of resistance for the marginalized in these hierarchies include “defending a politics of social location” rather than vacating and destroying it (p. 14). To understand identity is to understand the point where categories intersect , and this chapter is an effort to shed light on those points for poor and working-class people in rural and Appalachian places. Of particular importance for understanding rural and Appalachian social hierarchies is the way in which the hierarchies create tensions for young people, as they are 287 “pushed out” of the context by education, ambition, and economic pressures to leave the local world around them, and are simultaneously “pulled back” by parents, families, and local communities that treat the exodus as a betrayal to the local culture and familial ties and obligations. Rural and Appalachian children and young adults in particular, as will be seen later in this chapter, are positioned low in social hierarchies, and the “pulling” and “pushing” are as much acts of resistance as they are the inculcation of low ambition as it sometimes seems to be portrayed by cultural observers and critics. Given the changing economic dynamics of rural places, this pulling back and pressure to stay can be difficult for young people. For example, the old extractive economic base of Appalachia around coal, other mineral resources , and timber is increasingly disappearing, and not being replaced in all places where it disappears. Where it is being replaced, it tends to be by tourism, low-wage labor, and service economies (e.g., Walmart). As is often the case, education is held up as the solution to economic woes. But this tends to be a double-edged sword as public schools have been one of a host of public institutions which, in the control of privileged white citizens, fail to serve well children in poverty and the working class. Also, for children and young people who do realize access to the promises of higher-quality education , the road to economic opportunity tends to lead out and away. Finally , social class hierarchies themselves are convoluted by the layering of whiteness within rural and Appalachian places. The complicating factor is not always—or even usually—race or gender (alone) but the limitations and stratification within whiteness around constructions such as “poor white trash,” “rednecks,” and “hillbillies.” A complicating factor for doing this work where white intersects white is that much of the history and narrative of the shades of whiteness within rurality and Appalachia includes marginalization of others by marginalized poor and working-class whites. Even limited power and privilege gives power over some group somewhere. In the context of intersectionality , whites in rural and Appalachia places can be run down and simultaneously run down others in the intersections by their own vehicles of marginalization. This is a critical, though not totalizing, aspect of whiteness outside of urban and suburban America. This chapter will consider the ways in which identity can be misunderstood and misrepresented in a social context that is typically treated simplistically and monolithically by observers (both inside and outside the social context). Many of the representations of rurality and Appalachia are simplified due to a lack of understanding and recognition of the contexts’ social and cultural complexities, and also as part of marginalization : representation is easier to manipulate in simple culturally constrained terms such as the ones sometimes applied to rurality and Appalachia. This “mistaken identity politics” will be examined in light of 288 Van Dempsey [3.145.151...

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