comments:
Read The Forgotten Girls by Monica Potts. She grew up in Clinton, Arkansas and made it out, but her friend didn't and succumbed to teenage pregnancies, drugs, poverty, etc. She speaks of this very thing (page 234-239): "Property rights, land ownership, and gun ownership are all tied up in this political worldview. It doesn't matter to people in Clinton how destitute they are, how fundamentally poor the soil is, how frayed its social safety net. It doesn't matter that the antigovernment sentiment they espouse is heading to a nihilistic endpoint calling on the government to cut valuable programs they use themselves. Or that their outrage over taxation only helps the kind of wealthy people who don't live in Clinton. It doesn't matter to them that they have more in common with poor people of color than rich white people. The white women in this community don't seem concerned that the systems they support shields their abusers and circumscribe their lives. Their inheritance came down to them as land, so that's what they want to protect. They concentrate on their own personal redemption, even as their communities are dying. It makes them withdraw from one another, even further from a sense of community, so that people like Darci, who suffer the most, struggle to find anything safe to grab on to."