Rural Women and Gendered Fields

I received that heavily forwarded email message warning me about Barack Obama. It was racist. It was full of lies and innuendo. It told me to forward it to everyone I knew. You know the one.

You know how those forwarded messages usually contain lists of all of the other people it has been forwarded from and to? And normally we don’t know them.

This time, I knew most of them. Actually, my first impression was that it must be the roster from the local Lutheran Church. These are people I know and some of them I work with. One of them is a Christian therapist.

Normally I just hit “discard” with forwarded messages and do not read them. I never forward them. This time I not only hit “reply all,” but I copied and pasted some of the email addresses from earlier forwarded messages into the TO: header so everybody that I could tell had received and or forwarded this bit of nastiness was going to get my response. I wrote:

This is not only incorrect. It is racist. It is the “swiftboating” of Barack Obama.

And I signed my name — both first and last names. And I sent it to all those people most of whom will know who I am. Because this is rural America and we all know each other.

After I sent the message, I googled “swiftboating barack obama” and found some links on it, among them:

The swiftboating of Barack Obama on Daily Kos

Anybody who will deny there is a pattern to the racially charged comments that have been interjected into the presidential race is either naive or a liar. It cannot be denied and it’s become quite obvious it is a calculated effort to turn what is Barack Obama’s greatest strength against him.

Barack Obama’s greatest strength is the fact that he transcends race, and this generates majority appeal.

This article blames the Clintons. I don’t want to believe that. I’m not going to believe that.

Whatever the source, the point I make is this: from now on don’t take for granted because this is a rural area that this will play here without comment. “Good” Lutherans, and other “good” Christian people in rural America - you participate in racist nastiness when you read and believe and forward this message.

We get called ingnorant rednecks for a reason some times. It is time to stop that behavior. No matter who you’re voting for - - to remain true to your faith, it is time to reject this kind of prejudice and racism.

Our small town weekly newspaper published an advertisement this week which told employers who hire illegal workers, “this is your last warning.” An Internet search for the group responsible for the ad took me to this web site www.sovereigntycolorado.com which begins playing the national anthem when I open up the page.

In Broken Heartland: The rise of America’s Rural Ghetto, (pub. in 1990), Osha Gray Davidson discusses the growth of hate groups in rural areas.

Although the scores of far-right groups that honeycomb rural areas are only loosely knit together, most of them share a Byzantine philosophy that combines ‘constitutional fundamentalism’ with a religious movement based on racist throught called ‘Christian Identity.’

They *refuse to recognize any government authority higher than the county sheriff (’posse comitatus’ is Latin for ‘power of the county’). They *believe that they alone are the true American patriots, and believe *the framers of the Constitution envisioned a ‘Christian Republic’ instead of a Democracy. (more…)