← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
Sarah Smarsh on What Pundits and Politicians Get Wrong About Rural America (Get Po-LIT-ical)
00:29:25
Author and journalist Sarah Smarsh has spent the last decade dedicating herself to correcting stereotypes, misinformation, and prejudice around the lives and beliefs of rural, working-class White Americans.
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Ever since the election of Donald TRUMP In 2016, there have been a lot of hand wringing about white working class Trump voters. Main street media outlets wanted to know what was the motivating factor behind this demographic turn to the candidate. Was it racial grievance? Ignorance? Economic anxiety? Author and journalist Sarah Smarsh believes the media is asking all the wrong questions. In fact, she's made a career out of correcting prejudices and preconceived notions. After all, that's her community, the people who raised her in rural Kansas. Smarsh asks why we spend so much time examining rural Trump voters and ignore the college educated people who also supported the former president. Why not spend time talking to the progressive Kansas residents who caucus for Bernie Sanders? Why not question the policies that have left public education underfunded? Smarsh collects a decade of her writing on poverty in the book Bone of the Essays of America by a Daughter of the Working Class. In it, she writes, the white, rural, working poor people about whom I most often write, they are your people too. Sarah Smarsh is the author of the memoir Heartland, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Great book. Her new book, Bone of the Bone, is out tomorrow. She's speaking tonight at 7pm at the Strand, but she joins me now in studio as part of our new series Get On Political Sarah, welcome to all of it.
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A
Hi Alison.
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B
So this essay begins back with your first writing in 2013. When you look back at that time, well, first of all, what was going on with you personally and politically then?
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A
Well, it was a very different moment for all of us, wasn't it? That's been quite a consequential decade in American politics that these essays sort of track. But nonetheless, I was already and had already indeed been focused on socioeconomic class with my writing. The topic at the time was less in vogue, I guess, and because of my own background, as you mentioned, coming out of working class or working poor economic environment and being a trained journalist and often finding myself in newsrooms where I was the only person with direct experience of Poverty or direct experience of a rural place. I had really kind of shifted toward or begun to shift toward writing from that lens or through that lens in an effort to, you might even say, diversify industry of journalism along those identity lines. And then it happened that just a few years later we emerged into a moment when class turned out to be at the fore of the national discourse.
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B
When you were putting together the series of essays, what did you notice about your own writing in that 10 years?
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A
Well, as a writer, I hope that I've improved and won, as you know, would always hope that they expand their craft in terms of the content of my writing. I guess that when I go back and look at these collected works, I feel a little bit validated or proud, I suppose, that my voice and my message has been consistent, hasn't followed any sort of trend or news cycle. It has abided what I have known to be true by way of my direct experience.
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B
So you have a dilemma when you start writing about the I and the me. The I and the me, you know, capital J. Journalism. Don't say I or me.
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A
Yes, that's right. So I was trained as a reporter, kind of. I was actually the last class of my journalism school to receive a kind of old fashioned newspaper training. And then I emerged into just the very nascent kind of dawn of the digital era that you, as a fellow journalist know, shook things up quite a bit at the industry level. And, and, and so I found myself not finding the traditional kind of newsroom employment that might have been true for me a generation prior, and in that moment finding a space and occasion to shift toward more personal essays and that first person that indeed I was trained to never use in my writing. I did find though, that once I allowed myself to cross that threshold and not only convey facts and reportage and the hard work of research, but also my own vantage and personal perspective, and indeed often intimate perspective on those same themes that more people connected with it than not just with their minds, but also with their hearts in ways that I think that for all of our information saturation at this moment in this media ecosystem, we're still craving that sort of deep connection that can only come by way of personal witness.
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B
My guest is Sarah Smarsh. The name of the book is Bone of the Essays on America by a daughter of the Working Class. You just noted, and you mentioned it earlier, that you know the field of journalism, it's open to the wealthy, you know, who can afford to be interns, who can afford to come to New York, who can afford to go to la. And sometimes the people, they don't have the cultural expertise that they might think they have or they don't have. When was the first time you realized that in a mainstream media piece or Main street media journalism that they had a huge blind spot about poverty or about poor or. I mean, I just feel weird saying poor. Yes, about poverty.
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A
Yeah. No, I struggle with that term too, but it's part of the vocabulary I would go all the way back to. You were talking about internships and who can access the journalism industry, particularly one that's increasingly coastal. The year 2000. I was just a couple years off the wheat farm. Alison and I called on a landline from my slum apartment in Kansas and convinced the investigative news unit at the New York affiliate of NBC to take me on as their summer intern. Turns out it was an unpaid internship. And an alum from ku, the University of Kansas, where I was an undergraduate, put me up in his Brooklyn apartment, which allowed me to take this unpaid job, still at some sacrifice. But in that newsroom there at 30 Rock, quite a distance from the farm where I was slopping hogs, it became real clear where I was and where my family was, in a sort of pecking order of class that I'm not sure at the moment I even had the language to articulate, because at that moment we were still really deep in a kind of national denial that we even have a class system. We're just now, I think, kind of waking up to the fact that this supposed meritocracy actually involves a class structure. But, yeah, there in that newsroom, I took a lot of chiding, I got a lot of jokes about where I came from, and they weren't always well intentioned, even often had a real mean edge and disparaging quality, assuming that I was lesser for where I came from. So class isn't just about money. I think it's about place, too. In urban culture, post industrial, this has been increasingly true for the last century. You know, if you want to make it, so to speak, economic opportunity requires that you go to a city. And that has resulted in some demographic shifts that leave rural spaces being, I don't know, painted with a broad brush, as though it's folks who just can't make it or aren't as smart or are backwards even. And I definitely encountered those attitudes. And I knew that those same people, my people who were being disparaged, were also growing the food that was on the lunch table being enjoyed by the folks who were making the mean jokes and so that contra. And you know, I should say this didn't always come from sometimes it was even well intentioned people, well meaning people. It was just.
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B
That can be the worst.
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A
Yeah, it can be the worst blind spots. And I think you might have used that term. So yeah, I think. And then I went, I, a few years later ended up in graduate school at Columbia. And so that was a whole nother strata of class consideration there. In an Ivy League institution, when you.
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B
Are working on a piece, quite often the person who writes the headlines, you get in a battle with a person over the headline. Your piece could be about one thing and the headline would be about another. What's an example of that?
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A
Yeah, so I'm always kind of running defense on this front. If I write a piece, say like let's talk about the large political minority in red states who could potentially be an important political faction and indeed I would argue were crucial to my state of Kansas voting down the first post Roe ballot measure that would have harmed reproductive rights. And that measure was successfully voted down in large part because of an overlooked political minority in that state building a coalition and fighting that back. I could write a piece about said group and then, you know, a headline might be paired with it saying here's what you're getting wrong about Trump country. Or the image that would be paired with it would. It would be very familiar to me if it were, you know, some guys wearing MAGA hats, even if that's actually opposite of what I'm writing about. So these sort of tropes now or easy stereotypes, media narratives that have become go to are so kind of deeply entrenched in the psyche at this point that I'm not sure it's always even conscious when these moves are made to just sort of flatly pronounce an entire region as a political or a cultural monolith. But it's happening and it's really dangerous. It's to our peril, I think as a nation. If we really want to understand, understand ourselves and who we are, why do.
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B
Why is it a peril?
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Well, I think because if you are not seeing a large group of people, and when I say a large group, I'm talking about millions. And if you are, when you are attempting to see them, misrepresenting them, or only seeing them through the lens of your own biases, then how can we ever engage in the sorts of conversations that are going to be required to not only repair the social fabric, but to right the course of a country that is facing, you know, myriad fronts of Injustice. So that's a long way of saying, I guess, that there are, there are potential allies to certain, let's say, progressive political movements who are in spaces that some folks with resources are writing off.
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B
Rather than going to a diner to try to find, you know, a waitress named Dot to talk to. What, what should journalists be looking for? What should they be asking?
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Yeah, well, I want to say too quickly that, and this is something I believe I write in one of these essays in Bone of the Bone, that it really isn't a well intentioned reporter coming out of New York. They might get some flack for what they get wrong covering the Iowa caucus. But like, it isn't really their, it's fair that that's not their space. And the person that really knows that place works probably at the Des Moines Register. So I would say that maybe leaning into the boots on the ground, journalists who are already there knowing their spaces, if you're writing for or reporting for a national platform, tapping into, you know, not to steal their reporting, to be clear, but tapping into the understandings that are already on the ground among people who maybe were laid off by their mid size newspaper 15 years ago, but who are still there working earnest on a blog, or there are people in these communities who know them deeply and who have skills as reporters. That digital moment that shook things up in the journalism industry feels like a long time ago, but it's recent enough that all over those regions there are trained reporters who know their place very well and they can give you the goods.
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My guest is Sarah Smarsh. The name of the book is Bone of the Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class. A lot of people have said this. I went googling down to find out if there was any research on it. And Pew Research said that we really should be thinking maybe more of urban versus rural, that more people who lean Democratic are in the cities, it's equal in the suburbs, lean a little more right in the rural areas. People have written books about this. First of all, does it ring to you, does that ring true to you.
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A
When you say does it ring true? Just the sort of framework of different spaces. I think yes and no. Yes, because there are real palpable differences in the culture and the experience of those two spaces. Even that framework is a little bit clunky because rural Iowa is very different from rural Georgia and urban New York City is very different from Omaha, let's say. But roughly speaking, yes, they're two very different experiences just involving geographic proximity or lack thereof. Is it isolation or is it a neighborhood and just the stuff of life as far as, like, who's there? As somebody who speaks in all sorts of spaces and travels the country frequently talking about this theme, this is going to sound trite, Allison, but I do mean it. Everywhere I go, there are good people. Everywhere I go, there are earnest people who want the same thing. They may be coming out of very different experiences. And also, I would say, in this 21st century media ecosystems, crucially, what I find is information sources play an immense role in someone's experience of reality, but the essence of who people are not all that different. I believe that is quite overblown, actually. And I say that confidently as someone who has lived in both of those.
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B
Spaces in Kansas and other rural areas are thought to be lacking in diversity. But it's a point that you make. It's not true.
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A
Yeah, this is the. You know, what do we get wrong about rural America? If I could nominate, like, point number one, it'd be that it's all white folks, because it ain't. There are counties in Kansas that are, as they say, minority majority, largely due to the meatpacking industry. In western Kansas, that's for decades now, has been. That workforce has largely been brown immigrants and, you know, let's say the rural south, the black belt. A friend of mine, Veronica Womack, founded a group called the Black Farmers Network. She comes out of a farming family. And we talk about the working class as though it's all white guys wearing hard hats and not people of all colors, some of whom work in the service industries and so on. Or when we talk about rural America as though it's all white farmers. I happen, by the way, to descend from white farmers myself. And yet that's just one piece of the 21st century Rural America that is far more diverse than people think, not just in racial terms, but in every way. There's gay folks, there's trans folks, there's even straight white folks who are their allies. Because we look at these red and blue maps as our framework for talking about the country. It provides this visual suggestion that if you cross a county line or a state line, that you suddenly now are in a place where everyone is one thing. These kind of this monochrome, if you will, that would paint a whole state, and on the ground, it's a much richer and more purple experience. And I think as someone who identifies as a progressive, if that happens to be your political bent, then when I said earlier, it's to our peril to misunderstand this truth about ourselves. It's because, gosh, to my mind, there's no braver activism or more important work for justice than is happening in a place where at the state level the policies are harsh to women or to people of color. And if in that space that those particular elements of diversity or facets of progressive activism are happening in earnest and then being erased by the national conversation, it sort of adds insult to injury.
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It's weird. I was actually just sitting here thinking to myself, when did maps turn red and blue?
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A
I believe it was during the 2000 election, actually.
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Yeah, it was during the 2000 election because it wasn't like that before. And somehow, you know, like, to your point there, everybody wants the same thing. You want your family to have food, have shelter. And it used to be like, well, we have differences in how we get there.
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Yeah.
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And there's something about the turning of the map that's just really, I don't know, not even questioned there. It's just a point.
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Yeah. Yeah. No, I think it's sort of has just kind of seared itself onto our collective psyche in ways that need to be explored. For sure.
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Yeah. We'll explore more with Saris Marsh after a quick break. This is all of it. You're listening to all of IT on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. I'm speaking with Sarah Smarsh, author of the new book Bone of the Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class. It'll be out tomorrow. Tonight at 7:00pm she will be speaking at the Strand. So we have you as part of our series Political. So we're gonna talk a little about politics. Yeah. In 2016, the years following Trump's election, you write a lot about what you see as the unfair focus on white rural voters instead of white college educated Trump voters.
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Yeah.
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Why do you think, first of all, why did the media cover it that way?
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Well, I think it's fair to say that there was a swing there in terms of a political shift, if you will, among a demographic. And that is indeed newsworthy. I think. I think then, though, it's a step further to say, and now that's the base of the Republican Party, that coalition, of course, and the current MAGA movement. And the Trump moment comes to us by way of very wealthy Republicans with a lot of degrees, some of which come from Ivy League universities. And so the engineers or the architects of that movement and to my mind, the propaganda that has made it so successful could use some more focus, to my mind, a sort of infatuation with or fetish. Yeah. I would think it's a sort of a media fetish about the, you know, the guy with the. The red hat at the diner that you mentioned. That sort of cliche. Yeah, he's. He's compelling tv probably because he says nasty, shocking things that maybe, you know, people from more privileged ranks of the Republican Party think, but don't say out loud. I want more stories about the privileged ranks of the Republican Party. That's what I'm saying.
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You write a bit about J.D. vance in your book. He's a senator now. He's obviously the Republican vice presidential candidate. What do you see as a fundamental thing that J.D. vance gets wrong about where he came from?
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Well, you know, when his memoir first came out, it didn't sit well with me because it had some kind of red flags for me as someone who was encouraged to get out of the space that I came from if I wanted to make it, as we say. And then I chose to move back to that place and have devoted my career to documenting it on the ground and not writing about it. In the rear view mirror, I saw some red flags that struck me as like kind of wagging his finger at the place he came from, blaming them for the outcomes of their lives in very individual, judgmental ways. That said, I don't think I said much about the book because I felt like, well, I'm happy for anybody to be heard who comes out of a background where they had to, to fight to survive. But what's interesting to you about the.
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Way that he has used the book.
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Yeah, right.
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For his political lifeline.
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And then fast forward to we're almost 10 years after that book emerged. And indeed, I think that those red flags I saw have proved correct, that there is really toxic opportunism afoot where his message has changed. What's convenient to his ability to acquire power and approval sort of seems to have guided his views. And now, of course, he's a vice presidential candidate with Trump who he previously famously had.
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Derived.
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A
Yeah, yeah. So.
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What would you want to hear JD Vance talk about if you were talking about this group?
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I would just like to not hear him talk, actually. We'll move right along.
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You actually thought about running for office. You met with Elizabeth Warren. You met with Chuck Schumer. He called you Sarah Jean.
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Right.
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So that's great for. That'll be great. Which is enough. Well, enough. You decided not to run.
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Yeah. You were.
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You were in it for a minute.
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A
Yeah, yeah. And that I felt honored that some people who I admire were encouraging me in that direction. And I thought, well, I ought to take a look at this. It was, we had a Senate seat vacated, an open seat, as they say in Kansas, and that seat had been Republican for, I don't know, something like 90 years. And there were some conversations about whether maybe I could flip it. And like you say, I did talk to Senator Schumer and Senator Warren and some other people along the way. Ultimately, after really kind of going inward and examining how I myself can be of best service to the moment, I found that while I'm not getting rich doing it, and while it maybe is a less glamorous version of service, I'm already doing what I'm called to do, I think, and I feel fortunate in that way. And actually Senator Warren, very kindly, when I let her know that I wasn't going to run, sent me a note saying there are many ways to serve. And I thought, isn't that right? And all of us have a role to play if we're interested in justice and a better country and a more perfect union. And I do feel that those of us who write words for a living, who tell stories for a living, not only are doing important work, but may be in some cases the most important work. Because to my mind, policy and government are nothing but reflections of the culture that they arise out of. And so I, yes, I'm talking about politics and policy along the way, but ultimately these are all functions to my mind, of a culture and a society that we shape by way of our views and beliefs and blind spots and values. And so I'm going to keep doing that.
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You write that your family was really disaffected or sort of apathetic when it came to politics, but now they are enthusiastic voters. What got them engaged?
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Yeah, when I grew up it was like they didn't vote. We lived way out in the country and there were some barriers to getting there. It depends on if your beater car can make it that far, how much gas you've got in the tank, and so on. But the message when I was a kid was they're all crooks. Kind of a distrust of both parties and the entire political system. In more recent years, I've been kind of amazed and I suppose delighted to find that my whole kind of crew has emerged as with a couple exceptions, but my close and immediate family are all My dad, who is a 60something white construction worker, was really lit up by the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, as were other members of my family. And I believe he now maybe refers to himself as a Democratic socialist. That was true for a while, at least. They're on the construction sites of Kansas. And so while that movement, or contingent within the Democratic Party never quite found a presidential candidate, it's the big tent, if you will, and the coalition that's been built by the Democratic Party. My, My family seems to feel. Feel at home in that space now and really excited to show up and vote.
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What did you think about Tim Walls as a choice?
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I'm a big fan. I'm a big fan of Tim Walls.
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Or even like just Tim Walls outside of the parties. Just a guy like Tim Walls.
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Yeah, no, yeah, I can. I can sniff a phony out pretty good about. Like, how country are you? Where do you come from? The small town, Nebraska. And him. That's the real deal. And I love it. I love to see it. And that he carries that alongside with his clear and authentic and, you know, affection for all people, including marginalized people of various sorts to whom he's been an ally. And in that way, you know, he reminds me a great deal of a lot of the men that I was raised with who, among. Who were just, you know, decent. Yeah. Often white off, sometimes a little bit rough around the edges, but, like, certainly not encapsulated by the vision of the Trump voter that has become synonymous with that region. And again, those quote unquote, red states, Tim Walz feels real and authentic to that region in ways that I think and hope are probably going to activate a lot of voters that the Democratic Party didn't know they could reach.
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What would you like to see discussed at the presidential debate tomorrow?
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A
Well, as someone who thinks a lot about place and class, of course, and the way that those two things intertwine and how they intersect with other aspects of identity, I don't anticipate that this will happen, but I would love. I would love. I could wish I could hope that a real direct conversation about class would occur. And the reason I wish for that is because while Trump and the Republican Party have to great and nefarious effect, you know, kind of employed, kind of pulled the levers of class in ways that I find hollow and cynical. You know, Vice President Harris is the one who could speak to that aspect of the American identity in a way that addresses it through real policy and concern, if the party will indeed finally go there, it's a language that, for whatever reason, for some decades now, the Democratic Party has been seemed reluctant to hold alongside their other concerns, and indeed, it intersects with every other concern. So I think it's time to go there. Yeah.
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B
One issue, one issue that you want to hear about tomorrow night.
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A
Well, this is a facet of class poverty. Haven't heard somebody talk about poverty in a long time. There's 40 million Americans living in it. A lot of them work. A lot of them have three jobs. A lot of them work full time. You can get at the topic of class and race and gender pretty quickly by talking about poverty in this country. And it's woefully under addressed.
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B
The name of the book is Bone of the Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class. It is by Sarah Smars. She will be tonight. Tonight she will be at the Strand. The book comes out tomorrow. It is nice to talk to you.
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You too, Allison. Thank you. NYC now delivers breaking news, top headlines and in depth coverage from WNYC and Gothamist every morning, midday and evening.
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