Rural People and the Working Class. Here’s How We Unite.
I grew up in a small rural white community on a tobacco farm in Eastern Kentucky. My dad was a strip miner, my mom was a grocery store clerk and a factory worker. I am a proud Appalachian. Being working class has given me a sense of belonging, courage and joy, but it has also meant a life of economic struggles for me and my family to keep a roof over our heads, food on the table, to afford medications, doctor’s visits and to even bury our loved ones.
I have been a grassroots community organizer in the South for nearly 20 years, a region with a long legacy of working-class movements. As the director of the Appalachia People’s Union, a project of Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), the largest national group organizing white people for racial and economic justice, I have committed to doing what I can to organize my own people into multiracial movements. The things my community needs—affordable housing, health care for all, strong public education and nourishing food—depend on working-class white Southerners choosing solidarity with people of color. I’m moving my people away from white supremacy because I am a rural, white, working-class woman from Appalachia, not in spite of it.
One of the most important lessons in organizing is that no matter what happens, we stick together. When those in power try to divide us, we have each other’s backs and know who the real enemy is. Divide-and-conquer tactics are what has led to MAGA’s success and power. The far right’s ability to successfully tap into the pain and suffering of working-class white people and divert their anger toward immigrants, trans kids and people of color instead of billionaires and crooked politicians who do the bidding of corporate interests and the ultra-wealthy has once again put Trump in the White House. It has handed MAGA both the U.S. House and the Senate, as well as many state and local governments and judges.
Like those who voted for Trump out of a place of fear and pain, those of us who voted, organized and campaigned to block him from the presidency are hurting too. Now that he has won, we are still hurting and also terrified. We are worried about the future of our communities: our trans loved ones, our immigrant neighbors, students in public schools and those already struggling to survive every day.
White people delivered this victory to Trump. Out of 76 million votes cast for Trump (2 million more than in 2020), 84% of those were white voters. To be clear, urban areas handed some of the largest margin shifts toward Trump, yet he gained even greater margins in rural white working-class counties than the last election.
It’s tempting to blame white rural working-class Trump voters, to see them as ignorant, hateful or “less than.” It’s tempting to push them away, to signal to everyone else, “It wasn’t me. I’m one of the good ones.” That’s human, and it can feel good to lash out and to surround ourselves with those who think and act like we do. But we should not fall into this trap.
Those of us who are fighting against MAGA must be crystal clear: the people to blame are the ruling-class billionaires, the people at the top. Not other working-class people.
If you are Southern, you know that Southern mothers and grandmothers love to give you a list of rules for how to behave, whether it’s how you act in the grocery store, at church or at school. Sometimes it’s a clear list of things to do, but other times, when the task at hand is less clear, you can count on a conversation many of us might label “here’s what we’re not going to do.”
So, in honor of the age-old wisdom of working-class Southern matriarchs, here’s what we’re not going to do.
We are not going to blame voters, people of color, Palestinians and Arab Americans or white working-class people. We will not blame rural people or Southerners. We will not under any circumstances blame each other.
Instead, we should blame those at the top who are getting rich by ensuring we all suffer. Let’s blame the richest person in the world, Elon Musk, who gave over $130 million to Trump, and whose wealth jumped by more than $70 billion since Trump’s election, according to estimates from Forbes magazine. Or let’s blame the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, and the biggest landlord in Los Angeles, who both gave millions to Trump’s campaign. Or how about we blame the billionaires who made their fortunes by taking advantage of the economic crisis in 2008. These are people who have a vested interest in ensuring working people do not stand together to win progressive change.
Fascism is often talked about as something that happened in Nazi Germany, something over in Europe that people are bringing here, but that’s not accurate. The Nazis studied the Jim Crow South and used it as inspiration. Fascism is American made. And because it is homegrown, SURJ has committed to the South because we know that if we want to defeat the MAGA movement, we have to defeat it where it’s strongest.
Through the Southern Strategy, the far right has spent generations capturing state legislatures and local governments, cutting funding from public schools, rural hospitals and other programs for working people, suppressing voters, and terrorizing queer people. As a region, the South is the poorest in the country, and the rural poverty rates here are significantly higher than urban poverty rates. But, unfortunately, the South is also the region the liberal Democrats have all but abandoned.
Instead of blaming us, let’s look to the rural South for answers, because of all the people in this country we are some of the most well equipped to deal with fascism and its origins. From slavery to Jim Crow, we have lived under and fought against fascist rule for generations. We can and have always been leaders in this struggle. Let’s look at our region as a key region to invest in, and know that when we win the South, we can win the whole nation.
In this electoral cycle, 3,500 people took action with SURJ. We talked to over 2.5 million voters, mainly in the South, specifically North Carolina and Georgia. In the places we organized, white voters came with us. But this work goes on year round and not just around elections. We are out here in the rural South and Appalachia knocking on doors, creating common cause, and organizing white people away from Klan and other far-right forces into multiracial fights for housing, health care and education. We are going to continue throwing down for those who are under attack like immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, and the working class.
I know that where we go and where we organize, we win and that gives me enormous hope. In honor of the 10,000 strong multiracial “redneck” coal miners in the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia, whose September 1921 labor uprising was the largest in this nation’s history, you will see me and my folks in rural eastern Kentucky wearing our red bandannas and contending for our people just like our ancestors did, one conversation at a time.
My friends, we cannot be divided. We must turn toward each other. It’s the only way through.
[Beth Howard is Appalachia Organizing Director of Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) and the author of Rednecks for Black Lives, a forthcoming memoir from Haymarket Books. She lives in Lexington, KY, but grew up in a rural white working class community in Eastern Kentucky. Beth has been a lead organizer on winning campaigns to raise the minimum wage and restore voting rights. She's also worked on winning electoral campaigns engaging white working-class Southerners. Beth is the creator of the viral narrative campaign Rednecks for Black Lives. You can find her on Substack at Working Class Love Notes and online at bethhowardky.com.]
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