Hillbilly and the People Who Explain Us to Ourselves

Some places in rural America, the insult is "hillbilly." In other places it's "redneck," "country bumpkin," "hick", or some other colorful name folks in the cities use when they think they're smarter than the people who grow their food, mine their coal, or keep their lights on.

Academics have fancy names for it now. Urban Chauvinism. Urban-Centrism. Ruralism. Metronormativity.

That's a whole lot of twenty-dollar words to describe something country folks have known for a long time: some people think rural America is backward, ignorant, and just one good TED Talk away from being fixed.  Get them rural folks to vote right.

Growing up on our family dairy farm in the coalfields of Virginia, I didn't know any of those words existed. Truth be told, I didn't even know this kind of prejudice existed. Dairy farm families don't get to go on trips very much. Cows expect to be fed every morning whether you've got plans or not. Vacations on a dairy farm are mostly standing at the feed trough and imagining you're somewhere else.

Back then, our world was pretty simple. We knew Big Stone Gap, Appalachia, Norton, and a few places where we played football. We didn't spend much time worrying about what folks in Richmond, New York, or Washington thought about us because, frankly, we were too busy making hay before it rained.

Then came December 5, 1985.

Our high school football team from Big Stone Gap was playing for the state championship at Bullitt Park. We were facing Virginia’s number-one ranked team in our division from outside Richmond. Their star running back had already signed with Penn State back when Penn State football was just shy of a religion.

Not many newspapers gave us much of a chance. Looking back, some of those urban sportswriters probably figured we'd arrive at the game riding mules and carrying moonshine in our water bottles.

Then came the opening kickoff.

They returned the ball, broke their huddle, clapped their hands in unison and yelled, "Let's kick these DUMB HILLBILLIES' asses and get the hell out of THIS HICK TOWN!"

I looked over at our starting defensive tackle. His face turned so red I thought steam might come out of his ears.

"Y'all said what?" he asked.

They repeated it.

Punches flew. Yellow flags hit the field before the first official play of the game. I don't know if it's in the rule book, but insulting a mountain boy's people and his ancestors apparently carries a fifteen-yard penalty.

After the referees untangled everybody, we gathered in our huddle. Our team captain looked every one of us in the eye and said, "We'll die right here on this field today before we lose this game."

Believe it or not, on that day, we would have.

If you've never been insulted so badly that your ancestors felt it, then you probably can't understand that moment. We could. Those weren't just words. They were an attack on our families, our hometown, and every coal miner, farmer, and factory worker who had ever called these mountains or rural America home.

That's where filmmaker Ashley York's documentary Hillbilly picks up the story.

The film isn't really about politics, coal, or stereotypes, though all those things make an appearance. At its heart, it's about dignity. It's about what happens when people who have never lived or grew up in your community decide they already know everything about you.

If you've ever uttered the phrase, "Rural people vote against their own interests," or said, "They just need more education and they'd vote differently," or "We just need better messaging", then I would encourage you to watch Hillbilly. It may not answer every question, but it will help explain why so many rural Americans bristle when outsiders explain us to ourselves.

That's a lesson the Democratic Party especially needs to learn. Too often, well-meaning urban consultants and self-proclaimed "rural experts" move to the country, plant a garden, buy a few chickens, maybe even a couple of goats, and suddenly decide they've unlocked the secrets of rural America.

Bless their hearts, but raising three hens and a tomato plant doesn't make you a hillbilly any more than buying a cowboy hat makes you a rancher.

Too many Democratic consultants and candidates fly into a rural county, eat breakfast of biscuits & gravy at the local diner, snap a few pictures beside an old barn, and then head back to the city convinced they've figured out why rural folks vote the way they do. They haven't. Rural culture isn't a costume you put on or a weekend hobby you pick up. It's something handed down by your great-grandparents, your church, your community, and the work you do every day.

If you don't talk like us, if you don't sound like us, and if you've never sat on a back porch listening to stories while lightning bugs flickered over a hay field, then you may only know a lot about rural America on paper.

You're still talking about us rather than with us.

I'm pleased to announce that award-winning filmmaker and documentarian Ashley York has agreed to join us on the Rural Route Review podcast in the coming weeks. In Part Two of this series, we'll ask her why she made Hillbilly, what she has learned since its release, and whether America understands Appalachia or rural America any better today than it did when the cameras first started rolling.

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Learn More About Ashley York and Hillbilly

Ashley York's Website: https://www.ashleyyorkhere.com/appalachiareckoning,

USC Cinematic Arts | School of Cinematic Arts Directories

USC Cinematic Arts

Stream Hillbilly:https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/hillbilly/umc.cmc.5bad7d7kb5xhlyl6zbpsve16t

Film Information (IMDb):https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8218940/

Streaming Availability (JustWatch):https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/hillbilly

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