Dispossessing the Poor, Part VII-Divided means conquered

 A few weeks ago, I talked about agrarianism versus industrial capitalism and the fact that by 1800 many people had come to regard subsistence farmers as - not quite civilized. This was because they produced pretty much only what they themselves needed, rather than “cash crops” to be sold and thus turned into money that would circulate around. I later connected that philosophy to the dispossession of many Appalachian farms, turning those farmers into cogs in a labor machine.

It is worth noting, though, that not EVERYONE (other than the farmers) felt that way. Sure, Alexander Hamilton - secretary of the treasury - was deeply invested in that philosophy and in a global, money-oriented economy… but his political rival, Thomas Jefferson, believed in an “agrarian ideal.” He believed that small farmers were the backbone of America, and the very fact they were self-sufficient is what made them so important. Beholden to no one, they were free to vote their conscience without pleasing landlords or employers. Another Founding Father, Thomas Paine - always a bit of a radical, who’d been calling for years for the government to provide more aid to the poor - wrote a pamphlet called “Agrarian Justice,” in 1797. “The landed monopoly …has produced the greatest evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them…and has therefore created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before.”

The Market Revolution and the related concept of Manifest Destiny doomed the Jeffersonian vision and helped ensure a more Hamiltonian one. So which political party actually has consistently protected the “little guy?” Well, neither one, really. Both are and have been indebted to Wall Street and big business. I still maintain that, over the past century, the Republicans have been many times worse for the working class than the Democrats. For more than half-a-century now, they’re the ones that have used racial dog-whistles (or, more recently, megaphones) to distract their working-class voters and prevent them from really noticing how bad GOP policies are for them.

I want to tell you about my friend Hy Thurman. Originally from Tennessee, in 1968, he was one of the roughly 40,000 Appalachian transplants in Chicago - we probably all know people who moved to Detroit, Indianapolis, or Chicago for work then. In Chicago, they were concentrated in a run-down neighborhood called “Hillbilly Harlem,” where they were often the object of ridicule… and worse. They not only lived in tenements, they were targeted for police brutality. Hy and a bunch of other young, white Appalachians formed a group called The Young Patriots to fight for their rights. They allied with the Black Panthers (under Fred Hampton), the Young Lords (a Puerto Rican group), as well as AIM (the American Indian Movement), in what they called The Rainbow Coalition. There’s an HBO movie about it, “Judas and the Black Messiah.” All these groups realized that race was a con, put upon them to keep them from uniting together on all the things that, as poor people, they had in common. This probably does not conform to your perception of Black Panthers, who are usually presented as “anti-white.” There is a big difference between being “anti-racism” and being “anti-white.”

And that’s the point, on several levels. One, what you think you know about Black Panthers or Black Lives Matter might not match up with reality, and you should take a closer look at it. Two, when you have representatives from many different groups, INCLUDING white people, coming together in solidarity to fight for ALL their rights, together - that is not “division.” That is unity. It is always discouraged by the status quo, which doesn’t want change. The ones who are trying to break those groups APART from each other, they are the dividers… and they have an agenda. Unless you are incredibly rich, that agenda is not meant to protect YOU.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.