New book: White Rural Rage: the Threat to American Democracy.Tom, we'll start with you: why are white rural voters a threat to American Democracy?Tom: We lay out the four-fold threat...1) They're the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant and anti-gay...2) They're the most conspiracist group, Qanon support, election-denialism...3) Anti-democratic sentiments; they don't believe in an independent press... white nationalist, Christian nationalist...4) Most likely to excuse or justify violence as an acceptable alternative to peaceful...
In fairness the Native Americans had to endure decades of being the designated villians before anybody started making movies that attempted to treat them fairly or sympathetically (like 1948's Fort Apache or 1953's Hondo) and even longer before they began to enjoy being represented wholly positively (probably the 1960s with Little Big Man, but definitely it became the standard after 1990s Dances With Wolves -- ironically both named after the white character in the film).
Likewise, just as Hollywood employs very few Southerners to play villanious Southerners -- the racist Texan sheriff in Smokey and the Bandit was played by Jackie Gleason of Brooklyn, New York -- a lot of the "Indians" in the old films were just white guys with painted faces. Hondo's Vittorio, the noble Apache leader, was played by an Australian of English descent. You not only can't expect fair representation, you can't expect representation.
All of these charges are tendentious formulations at best, but they're central casting's role for us. This is the only role we're going to be offered, and if we won't play it they'll find someone who will -- probably FBI agents dressed up like "white nationalists" with khakis and tiki torches, or "Christian nationalists" with bibles, or whatever name focus-groups well this cycle.
UPDATE: Matt Taibbi finds that this trope is far older than I had realized.
2 comments:
An interesting coincidence: Last week I was reading an article (it might have been in Spiked!Online) about "rural horror" and a recent bit of handwringing in England. Supposedly, the English countryside is intimidating to "members of visible minorities" because of the natives, and the cultural assumptions in and about rural England. The rebuttal pointed out that a number of novels going back to the early 1900s, and films and TV programs, have played on the tropes of rural horror and rural rejection.
Richard Hoffsteader implied something similar with parts of his work, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," written in 1964, as did other historians from that period.
LittleRed1
PS. A gent I know who is a Southern Cheyenne Dog Soldier grumbled about Dances with Wolves that once again, the Cheyenne and Kiowa are the bad guys. He's tired of the Sioux always being the heroes. (But see Pow-Wow Highway for contrast. [That film has a LOT of Northern Cheyenne and Navajo in-jokes.])
LR1
I ran across the book several days ago. Plan to read it for entertainment.
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