Comments on Eliza darling’s “O Sister”

Abstract

In the iconic 1970s Western, the eponymous protagonist Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are relentlessly pursued by a posse of strangers prompting them to ask repeatedly: ‘‘Who are those guys?’’ The same question is posed here about folks who are labeled as ‘‘White Trash’’ or ‘‘Rednecks’’ and doubtless other unlovely sobriquets as well. As a small child resident in Little Rock, Arkansas, a denigrating contraction of poor was added to the unflattering name to make the label ‘‘po’ white trash,’’ the unofficial appellation of the neighborhood in which our family was then resident. When I asked my mother who and what were ‘‘po’ white trash,’’ she immediately referred to the Martins, the family next door. The why came next; only ‘‘po’ white trash’’ would give their children such idiotic names as Dodo Earl and BoBo Earl, my twin playmates. She pointed out that the Martins were recent arrivals from the Ozarks, home to what she called ‘‘hillbillies,’’ ‘‘a backwards bunch of folks,’’ she explained. The general thrust of Darling’s argument can be summarized as follows. Through media and film, a stereotypic image of white trash has been created and promulgated for a very long time. Essential to this image is a catalogue of dubious behavioral traits such as a hyper macho adoration of firearms and pickup trucks, misogyny, sexual profligacy, and reactionary politics. This image has been promoted by media, both in print journalism and cable television, in addition to film: motion pictures such as Deliverance and O’ Brother Where Art Thou? This image is almost entirely negative and has little to do with any nuanced account of the existential verities of the rural white poor it purports to describe. Like all stereotypes, it is never difficult to find some people who actually embody the image if you really want to. But to embrace stereotypes blown up to caricatures in the ‘‘white trash’’ imagery Darling describes, is to fix one’s vision upon the hole rather than upon the doughnut. Simply