If your eyes are on me, you’re looking at country.*

It seems the MSM is going absolutely bonkers in trying to portray Hillary Clinton’s declaration of the obvious as playing the “race card”.

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

Now first of all, there is absolutely NOTHING racist in what she said. It happens to be a fact (as were her comments about LBJ/MLK that the Obama campaign used in their own race-baiting game). I suppose that by extension the AP must be racist because they were the ones that reported what she said in the first place.

Now the attention turns to West Virginia and Kentucky and the MSM/Obama nutroots/Obama campaign want to remind us just how racist those Appalachian hillbillies are.

May 9, 2008 — WASHINGTON – First it was Bill Clinton dismissing Barack Obama as just another black candidate winning South Carolina.

Now comes Hillary Rodham Clinton, splashing moonshine onto those smoldering embers by telling West Virginia voters that “hardworking Americans, white Americans” support her, not Obama.

Now isn’t Charles Hurt from the NY Post the clever one? With his headline “Desperate Hillbillies Threaten to Break Up Party” and his first few paragraphs, he managed to insult a former President, the junior Senator from New York, AND 21 million people in 13 different states.

See, it is perfectly alright to use derogatory, inflamatory, and prejudicial language against people, as long as they are poor white people who have a history of being looked down upon and pigeon-holed as “white-trash” and “rednecks”. And don’t even think about comparing them to African Americans. Apparently their fragile psyches (or at least those of the white people who pretend to speak for them) can’t possibly take the trauma.

I know what Appalachia is like. I grew up in Lenoir, NC, which is in Caldwell County in the western part of the state. I went to a High School that kept a box of shoes in the office because so many of my classmates didn’t have any, and they would have to dart quickly into the office in the morning to “borrow” a pair before the other kids saw them. I watched kids get off the bus on what seemed to me a deserted stretch of road and wander up the ravine (or holler, to the locals) to God knows what kind of home. These were not do-nothing lazy “hicks” either. Most of them worked for minimum wage in the furniture factories of Western NC/Eastern Tennessee.

Not only did I grow up in Appalachia NC, I went to college in Radford, VA, and I went to grad school in Kentucky, so for most of my life I have lived and worked in this area. Discrimination continues to be a problem, as noted by many academics:

The model of ethnicity has been applied in this paper to Appalachian natives. The problems suffered by Appalachians in terms of high dropout rates, institutional discrimination, prejudice, and stereotyping are familiar to other ethnic minority groups. Yet because the majority of the population in Appalachia are racially indistinct from mainstream Americans, there is resistance to the notion of ethnic difference. This has significant repercussions.

One of the stereotypes of Appalachia is that they are all racist. In fact, people in Appalachia are not any more racist than the white population in general. During the lead up to the civil war, Appalachia tended to side with the abolitionist North. That is why West Virginia exists in the first place:

At the outset of the Civil War the northwestern counties of Virginia overwhelmingly opposed the state’s ordinance of secession (Apr. 17, 1861). Unable to halt Virginia’s secession from the Union, westerners in the state were quick to take advantage of a long-awaited opportunity for their own separation from Virginia. Protected by federal troops, delegates representing most of Virginia’s western counties met at Wheeling on June 11, 1861, and nullified the Virginia ordinance of secession, declared the offices of the state government at Richmond to be vacated, and formed the “restored government” of Virginia, with Francis H. Pierpont as governor.

Appalachian people have a history of poverty, discrimination, unequal access to education and jobs, and being pandered to by politicians. Sound familiar to anyone? In fact, they probably have more in common with most African Americans than the so called “creative class”. They also are typically hard working, committed to their families, and have a rich cultural heritage, also very much like the African American community. In my opinion it is the height of hypocrisy on the part of the white liberal blogger set to embrace one of these communities and reject the other. If not hypocrisy, then it is the blatant using of the African American community to reach their political goals. How very Machiavellian of them.

I want to point out that some of the language we are bound to see in the coming weeks, words like hillbilly, hick, white-trash, bubba, etc. are every much as hateful and bigoted as the n-word, and other derogatory ways of speaking about African Americans. We will see them, I would wager however, on the headlines of every prominent newspaper and MSM website being used with impunity.

I would like to add that my favorite daughter of Appalachia, Loretta Lynn, was not only an extraordinary singer/songwriter, she was also at the forefront of feminism. “The Pill” was banned from a lot of country music stations when it first came out in 1975, take a listen:

(note: I’m not sure what the video is about, but this was the only complete version of the song I could find on You Tube)

*Post title from “You’re Looking at Country” by Loretta Lynn.