Race Critical Theories Book Response:

Race Critical Theories

Book Response: Chapters 1-7

Buck, Pem Davidson. Worked to the Bone: Race, Class, Power, & Privilege in Kentucky.

New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001.

Worked to the Bone by Pem Davidson Buck is subtitled Race, Class, Power, & Privilege in Kentucky and this neatly sums up the focus of her work. Buck, by training an anthropologist, embarks upon a critical examination of the construction of social and economic privilege in Kentucky in racial terms. Buck resides and works in the two counties she studies, thus she provides a personal and intimate as well as a scholarly overview of what she calls the false lie of 'trickle up' economics in the region. Instead, Kentucky is a world where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer as the elite work the poor to the bone, poor blacks and poor whites alike.

For Buck, the exploitation of poor whites is inexorably tied to the racial oppression of blacks that has long characterized the Southern states. But for Buck, race is clearly a social construction, not a pre-existing fact. The construction of race is based upon the class system of the South, and blackness and whiteness was created to justify both slavery and the oppression of poor whites. Buck is white, and moved back to Kentucky to 'live off of the land' but she admits that even though she and her husband struggled, she still was insulated with benefits of being middle rather than working class, as well as enjoyed the cultural benefits of white privilege (1). This also underscores how even people like Buck who reject racial oppression still benefit from their class and the fact they are physically 'read' as white, although race is a social construction.

Buck writes that she penned her work not to encourage a fixation on the past, but to shape the present and the future in a more positive fashion. She wishes to create greater unity between the poor peoples of Kentucky, black and white, in a state where even the official song "My Old Kentucky Home," still celebrates slavery (11). Although in Kentucky the privileged classes are white, not all whites are privileged. This is what is particularly noxious about how white class privilege is constructed. When the South was settled in the 1600s, the poorest white colonists were persuaded by the elites that it was also in their interests to create a system of slavery defining blacks as inferior. Rebellions like Bacon's Rebellion in the 1670s were put down through a false system of granting minor privileges to the poor because of their whiteness, like the ownership of small plots of land and greater access to voting rights.

Because blacks were so oppressed white upon white class oppression seemed as bad, relatively speaking, because at least poor whites had the benefits of whiteness, and more rights than slaves. This system of racial injustice created a state of false consciousness amongst poor, free whites, as poor whites identified with aristocratic individuals who actually advanced policies against the poor's economic interests. Poor whites were paid, not in money, but in the illusion that their whiteness made them superior, what Buck calls in Chapter 6 of her work a 'psychological wage.' Culture, in Buck's point-of-view, and the construction of race, thus had a greater importance upon the creation of modern Kentucky than a logical evaluation of individual's real interests. This is why both whites and blacks have been worked to the bone.

Discrimination against poor whites still abounds in present-day Kentucky in the form of stereotypes. Poor whites are often characterized as supposed 'rednecks' who deserve their economic fate because their days are devoted to "drinking, incest," and "family violence," and living lives of "general backwardness, bare-footedness, improvidence, and red-necked cussedness (7). "The actions of coal mine owners, of corporate tobacco buyers, or of manufacturing executives are irrelevant in explaining Kentucky's bony fingers if they can be explained by the problems in Kentucky's culture instead," not by bad corporate behavior (7).

In defending her thesis, Buck begins with evidence from her own life, as she opens with her struggles opening and operating a plumbing business with her husband. She even uses the metaphor of plumbing to describe class exploitation -- she strives, she writes, to provide a view from 'under the sink' of hard work, and describes upper-class white privilege as never trickling down to poorer whites except in sweat. Like a sink, the privilege system of Kentucky can never 'trickle up' from the bottom, and Jim Crow is a kind of drainage system, where poor white resistance to their fate is systemically diverted into hatred of blacks. Buck combines historical evidence stretching back to the earliest colonial times, as well as books, newspapers, and statistics available from contemporary sources, and her anthropological and anecdotal evidence. Particularly unique is her use of literary and musical sources, to metaphorically reinforce what her research and participatory observation has yielded.