Sarah Smarsh and I both grew up in the rural Midwest. But she’s the only one of us who’s written a book about it. Good for her! Her book is called Heartland, and I’d recommend reading it.
I wrote a bit about the book in an earlier post. But here are some more detailed thoughts I had as I read along.
The ‘White Working-Class’
Smarsh addresses her book to her hypothetical child who she raises in the rural midwest. It’s about generational rural poverty. It’s also about membership in the ‘white working-class’.
The ‘white working-class’ is more an ideological term than a reality. I’ve written about its connections to problematic ideologies. But there is a reality underneath it. It’s a reality of scraping by with lousy public services, precariously held land, and uncertain prospects.
Smarsh emphasizes the complex connections between class and race in American social life. She notes the co-existence of racial privilege and economic disadvantage. Many rural whites once benefited from government land policies, though they’re often held back by current policy and social norms.
Poorer rural whites in the heartland face scorn and stigma from wealthier whites. This comes even from ‘progressive’ wealthier whites, who operate from a universalized white middle or upper-middle classness.
The Heartland Under Financialized Capitalism
Smarsh writes about the particular ways the financialized capitalist, neoliberal era hits working-class rural white Americans.
Under neoliberalism, accumulation by dispossession is the main capitalist weapon against the rural poor. Unstable property values. Renewed flight of young people to cities. And rampant theft of rural property by banks and creditors. Smarsh documents this in Kansas, and it’s just as rampant in my own little corner of rural southern Indiana.
With dispossession and theft comes job instability and loss. Smarsh documents the creative money-making schemes rural Americans must turn to. For her family, it was selling fireworks in the summer. For my own family, it was a hodgepodge: ‘get-rich-quick’ books, basket-making, soap-making, house-cleaning, etc.
Newfangled Cultural Conservatism
Lots of people drive around in $50,000 trucks, wear Carhartt, complain about the ‘war on Christmas’, and watch Fox News. They’re angry and resentful against a world seemingly slipping from their grasp.
I’ve known for a long time that rural working-class whites usually aren’t the people doing these things. With some exceptions, this is wealthier white dudes in big rural houses or in the suburbs. They’re Trump’s base, and Trump’s base isn’t working-class.
Smarsh knows this, too. She points to this phenomenon for what it is. Namely, it’s a marketing ploy aimed at wealthier conservatives. I’d add that it’s also a stage of political development, and one where conservative, regressive forces push their goal of erasing class politics.
Smarsh summarizes the difference best when she writes that “for me, country was not a look, a style, or even a conscious attitude but a physical place, its experience defined by distance from the forces of culture that would commodify it. That place meant long stretches of near-solitude broken up by long drives on highways to enter society and then exit again.”
That’s a pretty definitive description of rural America. When you live where I grew up, you had to drive at least 30 minutes to find the strip malls and grocery stores defining suburban life. And you had to drive more like an hour+ to find a real city. Louisville, by the way.
Using Your Skills
When you’re working-class, you might not get to use your skills in a way you can easily control. Jobs aren’t about personal development or fulfillment. The mere having of a job might be, if you see yourself as a ‘working person.’ But you might not have a great deal of control over exactly what that job is.
And so you have to look for creative ways to put those skills to use. Smarsh talks a lot about this. Her dad wrote poems on lumber scraps. And her mom used her charm and intellectualism to sell real estate. If you have aesthetic skills, maybe you use those to decorate your home.
I think my family had similar experiences. My dad has great senses of aesthetics and architecture, and he’s pretty good at math. Over the years, he’s framed houses. Maybe many of the houses he’s framed haven’t fit with that aesthetic sense. But you can add something where you can. He might change a window design, or use a new kind of insulation.
My partner’s mother also had an aesthetic sense, which she put to use in her brief time as a crafts manager at Walmart.
Domestic Violence
One of the more shocking parts of Heartland is the epidemic of domestic violence across rural Kansas. It seems like the women in Smarsh’s family are transient, and the reason many are transient is that they’re running from bad men. Men who beat them.
Smarsh asserts a few times that domestic violence isn’t more common in situations of rural poverty than elsewhere. That middle-class men are just as violent.
Maybe. I’m not totally convinced by that. But it could be. The point, though, is that the rural poor have a much more difficult time getting out of the situation. And getting out of the situation often uses resources critical to getting ahead in life.
Standardized Testing
Smarsh got placed into a gifted and talented classroom after she moved schools. This is an area where race and class come back into the story. She began life in white schools, and she moved to a more diverse school. It was at the more diverse school where teachers recognized that she was a very smart child. Teachers saw her that way only after she was in a ‘diverse’ environment.
That’s an interesting statement on race and class in the US.
When I was a kid, I also got singled out for a ‘gifted program.’ As it happens, I took a test on it and I didn’t score highly enough. The reason is yet another statement on class in America. It was a vocabulary test. Kids growing up in the heartland don’t have great vocabularies, no matter how smart they are. My later career in the standardized testing industry told me a lot about what was wrong with that test.
Smarsh also did well on high school testing and the ACT, which comes as no surprise. Standardized testing is good for some and bad for others. But Smarsh and I were both members of one group of people who often benefit from testing: smart kids who attend schools with a bad reputation.
When it comes to college admissions, a 4.0 GPA isn’t really just a 4.0. It matters to colleges where you got that 4.0, and what kinds of classes you took along the way. And so, if you attended a school with a bad reputation and without a wide assortment of AP classes, your chances of getting into a great college are about zero. Even if your grades are great. But a top score on a college admissions test like the SAT or ACT can help overcome that bias.
Getting Out of the Heartland
Smarsh has conflicted attitudes about getting out. Especially when people from liberal bubbles pushed her on it. In her case, she attended college at the University of Kansas, lived on the east coast, and then moved back to Kansas. I think she saw a lot in Kansas worth loving.
Indiana also has a lot of things to love, and I also moved out. But I moved over, instead of back.
The idea of ‘getting out’ brings up a lot of conflicted thoughts for me. Every place has good people and bad people. And while it’s true that rural America suffers from a wide range of problems, those problems are most often due to broader socioeconomic forces. There’s still a vision of the heartland that, even if unachievable, makes a lot of sense to people.
