Redneck Press with Fried Chicken and Coffee

Here's some­thing to think about: how many pissed-off mid­dle and lower-class peo­ple, not just Appalachian natives, are out there? Quite a few, I'd guess. And we don't have to won­der about how they feel, because arti­cles like this one by Kai Wright make the whole shoot­ing match pretty clear. Thanks to Con­nie May Fowler who made me aware of this on Facebook.

If ever there was a “teach­able moment” about race in mod­ern Amer­ica, now is it. With the birthers and the repa­ra­tions con­spir­acy the­o­ries and the Nazi imagery at health care meet­ings, someone’s gotta explain why all these white folks are wild­ing out. We need an artic­u­late, impas­sioned race man to clar­ify things. But not Al Sharp­ton; I say pass the mic to Jim Webb.

Remem­ber way back when Webb, a Demo­c­ra­tic sen­a­tor from Vir­ginia and the voice of Appalachia’s neglected white yeo­man, was sniff­ing around a veep nod? In the midst of that media moment, he hit on an idea we’d do well to dwell upon. “Black Amer­ica and Scots-Irish Amer­ica are like tor­tured sib­lings,” Webb patiently explained to Pat Buchanan in a May 2008 Morn­ing Joe appear­ance on MSNBC. “There’s a say­ing in the Appalachian moun­tains. … ‘If you're poor and white, you’re out of sight.’”

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