Martha McCluskey wrote a couple of weeks ago on the ClassCrits Blog about some questions regarding class that arose at Martha Fineman’s recent workshop, Masking and Manipulating Vulnerabilities, at Emory Law School.  To summarize, McCluskey asked whether it is “problematic to analyze class as a category of inequality without directly engaging questions of labor rights?”

The genesis of that conversation at Emory was my speculation regarding the reasons for resistance to class analysis regarding whites and, by extension, resistance to the vulnerability paradigm.  Like my other recent work on class, my comments at Emory  focused on class mobility and did not engage issues of collective mobilization.  I thus believe the clear answer to McCluskey’s question is “no.”  Class mobility (think class ascension, although the sad trend these days is downward mobility) and class mobilization (as through unionizing and labor rights) seem to me different paths to empowerment of the working class and poor.  I see these as able to reside comfortably, side-by-side, on parallel tracks.  Indeed, now that McCluskey (echoing others at the Emory workshop) has voiced this issue, I find myself surprised that we do not see more law professors writing about class (im)mobility in a way that separates the issue from racism. That is, I am concerned that socially conscious progressives see challenges to upward mobility as stemming primarily, even solely, from bias against minorities.  If this is the case, we are failing to see that whites, too, are increasingly victims of the inequality gap and its attendant barriers to upward class migration.

We socially conscious progressives are attuned to the need to achieve higher educational attainment for racial and ethnic minorities.  We understand the need to facilitate their class ascension, to integrate more of them into the professional/managerial class, to bring them to the big table of law- and policy-making, in part so that we can benefit from what they know from personal experience.  Affirmative action programs have long been aimed at this outcome—and rightfully so.  We don’t just talk about unionizing minority populations, which presumes that they will stay working class, albeit in a materially more comfortable way.  We talk about diversifying the pipeline into the upper middle class, a/k/a the professional/managerial class.  We grieve the fate of minority children who could have become our political and business leaders—if only they had enjoyed something approaching equal opportunity.

Why, then, do we pay so little attention to class mobility among poor and working class whites?  Why would we limit ourselves to working for their mobilization—as in unions—rather than their upward mobility? Perhaps we have taken for granted white folks’ ability to transcend class boundaries because whites are not the victims of racism.  To quote Joe Bageant’s Deer Hunting with Jesus:  Dispatches from America’s Class War, we’ve been snookered by the “myth of the power of white skin.”  That is, we may buy into the “unspoken belief that if a white person does not succeed, his or her lack of success can be due only to laziness.”  We recognize racism as among the many factors that impede class mobility for racial minorities, but we don’t credit the structural barriers—or cultural bias against poor whites (see here and here)—when assessing the prospects of working class whites.  Yet many poor and working class whites face the same sorts of structural and cultural obstacles that burden minorities:  crummy schools, inadequate health care, a dearth of educated role models in their communities, and low expectations.

Yes, tragically, racism is alive and well in this country.  But minority status is not the only force that holds back working class young people who have the sheer native ability and ambition to get a college degree—or even go well beyond it.  Socially conscious progressives are smart enough to know this, but I see very few acknowledging it.  Which brings us to the State, hardly an innocent bystander of the “class war” to which so many insist on turning a blind eye.  To pick up Martha McCluskey’s metaphor, of course the different classes are not just layers in a cake with as much do with one another as with the cake pan (a/k/a the State).  No, the inferior education, health care and other dwindling supports to which the working class have access directly implicate the State and its grossly uneven distribution of resources.  Relying on local funding (as opposed to state and federal funding) of myriad services is just one component of this.  As President Obama recognized in his 2010 State of the Union address, “the success of our children cannot depend more on where they live than on their potential.”  Yet sadly it often does.  Read more here and here.    

I admit that I’m interested in class (im)mobility in part because I’m a “class migrant,” one “born and raised working class, who join the upper-middle class through access to ... education” (quoting the definition from Joan Williams’ recent book).  But the struggle for class ascension isn’t only supported by anecdote.  Data indicate that upward mobility for the working class is declining—at least as measured by higher education attainment.  In 1970, 61% of college students were the children of parents whose highest education level was a high school diploma or less—that is, they were “first-generation college.”  By 1990, that figure had fallen to 41%, and in 2000, only 22% of those who attended college were the first generation in their family to do so.  Even taking into account the role played by the rising percentage of people (parents) with college degrees over those three decades (though it remains less than 30%), the data suggest that the working class kid who gets to (let alone through!) college is increasingly rare.  Structural impediments bear a significant part of the blame.  Most obviously and recently, these include dramatically higher tuition for tertiary education, even at state colleges and universities.

In any event, I don’t see how this focus on class (im)mobility—which has both material and cultural aspects (as I shall discuss further in a future post)—precludes attention to organized labor.  I’m all for unionizing those who will remain in the working class, and I would hope that nothing I say be used to naturalize constraints on workers’ power to act collectively.  However much we increase mobility for some, we will always have workers with us, but they need not be poor.  Clearly, collective action is necessary to improve their material circumstances.

But focusing only on organizing the working class is arguably an insult to the extent that it objectifies and distances “them” from “us,” compartmentalizing them below us in the class hierarchy.  To focus exclusively on unionizing the working class overlooks the potential and desire of some to transcend class boundaries (as through higher education) and join the upper middle class.

Surely we want white class migrants among our ranks—just as we want class migrants from minority groups—sitting at the “big table” at which social progressive brainstorm problems, set priorities, and formulate solutions. I am convinced that they (we) could teach us (you) a few things.  Class migrants can remind those in power what generations of them have known:  like the racial privilege enjoyed by those of us who are white, our class privilege causes us to take too much for granted—and it tempts us to take too much individual credit for our own professional and material success.

Cross-posted to ClassCrits, SALTLaw Blog, and Legal Ruralism. 

Wealth and income inequality have been getting a lot of attention in recent months--at least in the New York Times. Op-Ed columnist Bob Herbert has been especially persistent about keeping the topic on readers' radar screens; read some of his columns here, here, here, and here. Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, and Robert Frank have had a say, too. Wealth inequality was also the subject of a "Room for Debate" feature a few weeks ago.

But geographic analysis of inequality has been little examined in the mainstream media until The Economist Magazine ran a couple of stories about uneven development and spatial inequality in the March 10, 2011 issue. The first "Internal affairs: The gap between rich and poor regions widened because of the recession," analyzes various nations' spatial inequality as measured by income and GDP. This analysis shows that Britain is the nation with the widest geography-based income gap: the per capita GDP is nine times greater in central London than it is in some Welsh regions. The smallest regional spreads, on the other hand, were in Italy and Germany, where "incomes in their most affluent areas are [nevertheless] almost three times those of the poorest." The United States falls at the British end of the spectrum, coming in second for inequality across regions among the nations studied. The District of Columbia, for example, is five times as rich as Mississippi. Further, the situation has worsened in the past few years.

Between 2007 and 2009 real GDP per head in the five richest states actually rose by an average of 2%, but fell by 3% in the five poorest. Both groups outperformed the national average, a fall of more than 4%. (The biggest slumps, both by more than 10%, were in Michigan, the eighth-poorest state, and in Nevada, site of the biggest house-price crash.)

The Economist notes that this is merely a continuation of a long-standing trend, and it attributes the phenomenon, in part, to the "dependence of poorer states on manufacturing, which has suffered big job cuts over the past decade." The feature concludes that "the income gap between richer and poorer areas is likely to widen further as government-spending cuts disproportionately hurt less prosperous parts."

One of the story's big attention getters is its comparison of GDP among regions and cities of different nations.

[O]ver a quarter of regions in Britain and Italy and one-tenth of those in Germany will this year have a lower GDP per head than the municipality of Shanghai. All the American states remain richer, but Shanghai looks set to overtake Mississippi by 2015; within ten years half of all the states, including Florida, Michigan and Ohio, could have a GDP per head lower than Shanghai and Beijing.

If the comparison were at the scale of the county rather than that of the state, these Chinese cities would no doubt be shown well out-pacing our nation's persistent poverty counties.

The second Economist feature on spatial inequality, "Gaponomics," takes up the question of what should be done to respond to this problem, particularly in the context of Britain. Instead of investing in particular regions or giving tax breaks to "enterprise zones" in these downtrodden areas, The Economist offers this proposal:

[M]ake it easier for people to move. Given inherent gaps in regional productivity prospects, there is a case for boosting mobility from declining regions to prospering ones. In Britain the main problem is the fetish for home-ownership and high house prices in the south-east, partly the result of severe shortages of supply. Easing planning restrictions below the Watford Gap would be a better way of helping Britons than propping up the north.

As a ruralist, I am immediately suspicious of policies that would aggravate uneven development. Among other things, they ignore those who will remain immobile and inevitably left behind. They also ignore attachment to place as an aspect of the political economy of rural areas in particular.

This story's second proposal is far more palatable: invest in education because it results in "the single biggest reward" for the nation--even if northerners then move south with their enhanced human capital. (Regarding the latter, I am reminded of this book on the rural brain drain).

Back in the United States, a recent New York Times editorial echoes the second of these ideas in relation to New York's funding scheme for education. In "Rich District, Poor District," the editorial staff consider how two of the state's school districts will fare under the Cuomo budget: "Ilion in the economically depressed Mohawk Valley, and Syosset, a wealthy town in Long Island’s Nassau County." Needless to say, it's not a pretty picture. Here' a summary:

The cuts would scarcely affect wealthy districts that rely primarily on local taxes to support lavishly appointed schools. But they would be catastrophic for impoverished rural districts that have been starved of state aid for decades and are still reeling from cuts levied last year .... Already struggling to furnish even basic course offerings, the poorest districts would need to cannibalize themselves to keep the doors open and the lights on.

As the editors express it, the $1.1 million cut Ilion is being asked to take to its $25 million budget "would not even come to a rounding error in the state's richest districts," like Syosset, which is being asked to absorb only a $1.4 million cut to its $188 million budget. But the New York Times editors aren't just arguing that school funding should be more equitable because "it's the right thing to do," they make an argument grounded in economics: Depressed regions like that around Illion "stand[ ] little chance of attracting high-skill jobs if [their] schools are allowed to deteriorate."

Going back to The Economist articles for a moment, I noted that enhanced investment in education is one reason for the income convergence across Germany, even as spatial inequalities become more acute in other nations. The story describes "huge national and European Union funds for infrastructure, R&D and education, as well as the transfer of some manufacturing jobs from factories in the western states to the east." For some reason, Germany sees reasons to take care of its citizens where they are--not to create incentives for residents of the less affluent East to move West. I'd like to know more about those reasons because I suspect they go beyond a sentimental desire to permit people to stay where they are and the attractive orderliness of a more evenly populated. I am guessing these policies are based in part on economic calculations about the value of existing infrastructure and human capital in the historically deprived East. Better understanding those reasons might inform debates in the United States about why regional development and reducing spatial inequalities--not fueling them--makes good sense from myriad perspectives.

Some of my writings mapping the sociogeographic concept of spatial inequality onto legal conceptions of (in)equality are here, here, and here.

Cross-posted to SALTLaw.blog, ClassCrits, and Legal Ruralism.

A headline in today's NYT proclaims, "'Culture of Poverty,' Once an Academic Slur, Makes a Comeback." Journalist Patricia Cohen writes of a new (or renewed) academic turn to discussions of poverty in relation to culture, and she recalls a time when such discussions became politically incorrect.

The reticence was a legacy of the ugly battles that erupted after Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant labor secretary in the Johnson administration, introduced the idea of a “culture of poverty” to the public in a startling 1965 report. Although Moynihan didn’t coin the phrase (that distinction belongs to the anthropologist Oscar Lewis), his description of the urban black family as caught in an inescapable “tangle of pathology” of unmarried mothers and welfare dependency was seen as attributing self-perpetuating moral deficiencies to black people, as if blaming them for their own misfortune.

Cohen then goes on to report recent events (e.g., the 2010 meeting of the American Sociological Association and a special issue of The Annals, the journal of the American Academy of Political and Social Science) which suggest an academic turn back to thinking about poverty in relation to culture.

Cohen quotes Robert Sampson, a Harvard sociologist who explains that culture in this context means "shared understandings." He continues:

“I study inequality, and the dominant focus is on structures of poverty” ... But he added that the reason a neighborhood turns into a “poverty trap” is also related to a common perception of the way people in a community act and think. When people see graffiti and garbage, do they find it acceptable or see serious disorder? Do they respect the legal system or have a high level of “moral cynicism,” believing that “laws were made to be broken”?

I find it interesting (albeit not terribly surprising) that Cohen's story focuses entirely on urban poverty. The photos and textual illustrations--like that of Sampson--are all drawn from urban contexts. Cohen does not use the words "rural" and "nonmetropolitan" even once.  She uses the phrase "persistent poverty" several times, yet among counties that the federal government designates as "persistent poverty" (meaning 20 percent or more of their populations were living in poverty over the last 30 years, as measured by the 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000 decennial censuses), 340 of 386 such counties are nonmetro (with populations under 100,000 and the single largest urban cluster with fewer than 50,000).  Surely these, too, are places where poverty and culture are intertwined.

Dean Joliffe of USDA Economic Research Service wrote in a 2004 issue of the agency's Amber Waves publication:

Persistent poverty is also more pervasive in the most rural areas, as seen in the share of counties that were persistently poor—4 percent of metro counties, 13 percent of micropolitan counties (the more urbanized nonmetro counties), and 18 percent of noncore, nonmetro counties (the most rural of nonmetro counties). (For more information on these classifications, see “Behind the Data” in Amber Waves, September 2003.)

A strong regional pattern of poverty and persistent poverty also emerges. No persistent-poverty counties are found in the Northeast, and only 60 of the nonmetro persistent-poverty counties are in the Midwest and West. The remaining 280 nonmetro persistent-poverty counties are in the South, comprising 25 percent of the total nonmetro population there. Furthermore, the nonmetro South, with over 40 percent of the U.S. nonmetro population, has a significantly higher incidence of poverty. Poverty estimates for 2002 indicate that, in the South, 17.5 percent of nonmetro residents were poor compared with 14.2 percent of all nonmetro residents. Understanding differences in poverty between nonmetro and metro areas of the U.S. is important to understanding differences in well-being across these areas and can help inform the policy dialogue on poverty reduction strategies.

If sociologists and policy makers are re-thinking the role of culture in relation to poverty, they should consider how rural sub-cultures--and not only urban ones--evolve in the context of and in response to entrenched, inter-generational poverty.

Dr. Jennifer Sherman's, Those Who Work, Those Who Don't: Poverty, Morality and Family in Rural America (2009) is a book that does just that. Sherman's book is an ethnography of a small logging community in northern California in the wake of economic restructuring associated with the northern spotted owl's designation as an endangered species. While Sherman does not endorse a "culture of poverty" in the sense of suggesting that poverty persists because poor people are lazy (quite the contrary--see pp. 185-86), she does describe a rural culture that is shaped by entrenched economic distress across a community. One aspect of the relationship between poverty and culture in some rural contexts is the turn to morality and the focus on family values as a way of differentiating among people in the context of a largely homogeneous community, where few other bases for distinction exist. We need more work like Sherman's--work that attends to rural difference and observes it with compassion--to inform policymakers' responses to entrenched poverty and its relationship to place and culture.

Cross posted to Legal Ruralism and SALT Law Blog.

In a recent post, I commented on what the film “Winter’s Bone” might reveal about white privilege.  There I discussed Ree Dolly, the film’s heroine, in the overwhelmingly white context of Taney County, Missouri, where the median household income is about 75% of the national median.  (In neighboring persistent poverty Ozark County, which seems more reflective of Ree’s milieu as depicted in the film, the median household income is about 65% of the national figure).  Now I want to discuss Ree’s whiteness and socioeconomic disadvantage in a broader context.

What if Ree goes off to Southwest Missouri State in nearby Springfield, Missouri?  or even the University of Missouri?  First, should she be the beneficiary of affirmative action in getting there?  In my opinion, absolutely.  (Read a recent discussion regarding the lack of white, lower class and rural privilege in college admissions here and here).  She would bring diversity of life experience to the student body, and she represents extreme socioeconomic disadvantage.

Second, would she enjoy white privilege in a more racially and ethnically diverse university setting?  Yes, and it would presumably be more apparent there.  I daresay, however, that her peers’ and professors’ responses to her—whether and to what extent she experienced discrimination or benefit in a range of settings—would be greatly influenced by how effectively she practiced class passing.  Can and does she "clean up well" in appearance and accent?  And let’s not forget that class passing requires money—for clothes and other accoutrement.

In her new book, Reshaping the Work-Family Debate:  Why Men and Class Matter (2010), Joan Williams quotes from memoirs of “class migrants,” those “born and raised working class, who join the upper-middle class through access to elite education.”  One said, “It is striking to me and many other working-class academics that faculty who would never utter a racial slur will casually refer to ‘trailer trash’ or ‘white trash.’”   Observing that “academia barely acknowledges working-class existence,” another wrote:  “Where I live and work, white Southern working-class culture is known only as a caricature.”  Yet another reported condescension from his professors, who resented having to teach the likes of him at lower-status institutions, where the relatively few working-class students who get to college typically wind up.

All of this is to say that people of color may over-estimate the ease with which working-class whites assimilate and are supported at colleges and universities as they attempt to transcend class boundaries.  In my own observation, no one is more judgmental of lower class whites than more privileged whites.

Bearing in mind the recent reminder that “anyone who even tries to talk about race risks public outrage and humiliation,” I want to suggest that we lose something by being (too) oppositional when it comes to race and ethnicity.  If we see disadvantage and hardship as being so thoroughly grounded in color, we build walls instead of bridges between the wide range of folks who are socioeconomically disadvantaged or otherwise “lower class.”  I am reminded of Angela Harris’ comment regarding racial differences among feminists:  “wholeness and commonality are acts of will and creativity, not passive discovery.”  It takes such acts to build bridges, and this is true in the context of class, too.  To do so, we may have to look past the differences between “us” and a poor, rural white population who are—Ree Dolly and her exceptional, noble ilk aside—generally unsympathetic, a population whose politics often seem contrary to their own interests, as well as to ours.  (Read more here and here).

I am also reminded of this point from Barack Obama's famous race speech of March 18, 2008:

Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience—as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives.

This perception by whites—partial as it is—is shared by the poorest, most disadvantaged whites.  They are not feeling the privilege because their lives are so lacking the trappings associated it.  Imagine someone telling Ree:  “You’re white, you’ll be alright.”  What a slap in the face—which might be what Ree would literally give back to the speaker.  White privilege isn’t feeding the kids.

I don’t see progressive law professors writing or talking much about socioeconomic or geographic disadvantage except when it is linked to racial/ethnic disadvantage.  This leaves poor whites out of the conversation, and beyond apparent consideration.  Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres are notable exceptions, doing in The Miner’s Canary:  Enlisting Race, Resisting Power and Transforming Democracy just what Harris urges.  They identify commonalities between rural whites and racial/ethnic minorities in relation to educational disadvantage.  More scholars should follow their lead.

In his New York Times column about the Shirley Sherrod debacle, Bob Herbert similarly calls us to seek commonalities across race lines, writing:

“The point that Ms. Sherrod was making as she talked in her speech about the white farmer who had come to her for help was that we are all being sold a tragic bill of goods by the powerful forces that insist on pitting blacks, whites and other ethnic groups against one another.

Ms. Sherrod came to the realization, as she witnessed the plight of poverty-stricken white farmers in the South more than two decades ago, that the essential issue in this country “is really about those who have versus those who don’t.”

She explained how the wealthier classes have benefited from whites and blacks constantly being at each other’s throats, and how rampant racism has insidiously kept so many struggling whites from recognizing those many things they and their families have in common with economically struggling blacks, Hispanics and so on.”

To write about poor white people—especially the nearly invisible ones in rural places—is not to say that racism is not a problem in this country (or, for that matter, “in the country”).  It is not to ignore white privilege.  But while whiteness has value in many settings, it's not a magic bullet.

I'm sad to report that there's more than enough social injustice and socioeconomic disadvantage to go around.  Plenty of groups—even poor white folks, a lot of them rural—are getting a piece of that bitter pie.  Ree Dolly reminds us of this.

Film critics have touted Ree as brilliant, a feminist heroine, a modern-day Antigone.  Like many film goers to whom I have spoken, they look past her trappings and her kin, and they see her value.  This is progress—but then, Ree’s character and courageous acts are exceptional.

Last year's winner of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Drama, “Precious,” also featured a resilient and courageous female lead.  Both Precious and Ree represent opportunities for us to see profound disadvantage in the context of communities with which few of us have first-hand experience.  Thinking about what these young women share, and not only how their experiences diverge, should remind us to see beyond color—to shared vulnerability and humanity.

Cross-posted to SALTLaw Blog and Legal Ruralism.

Written by Lisa R. Pruitt

This story, "Placing the Blame as Students are Buried in Debt," caught my attention when it appeared in the New York Times in May.   The report features Cortney Munna, a 26-year-old NYU grad who is buried under $100,000 of student debt.  Journalist Ron Lieber tells us that Ms. Munna would "struggle" to make her student loan payments if she had to, but she's been deferring them since her 2005 graduation, in part by taking night classes.  Lieber writes:

"This is not a long-term solution, because the interest on the loans continues to pile up. So in an eerie echo of the mortgage crisis, tens of thousands of people like Ms. Munna are facing a reckoning. They and their families made borrowing decisions based more on emotion than reason, much as subprime borrowers assumed the value of their houses would always go up."

This story, which also appears under the headline, "Another Debt Crisis is Looming, This One in Student Loans," discusses the range of stakeholders who could be blamed for the situation in which Ms. Munna and many others find themselves:  the universities, the parents, and--of course--the lenders.  At one point Lieber suggests a "shared failure of parenting and underwriting."  He continues:

"How could her mother have let her run up that debt, and why didn’t she try to make her daughter transfer to, say, the best school in the much cheaper state university system in New York? 'All I could see was college, and a good college and how proud I was of her,' [her mother] said. 'All we needed to do was get this education and get the good job. This is the thing that eats away at me, the naïveté on my part.'”

For me, one of the most striking aspects of this cautionary tale is the emotional component driving the decision for Cortney to attend an elite university like NYU rather than a state school.  How common is this, I wonder?  Cortney's family is described as middle class, but the story's details indicate quite a bit of financial insecurity (Cortney's  farther died when she was 13, and Cortney's mom was going back to college to finish her degree at the same time Cortney was at NYU).  It seems that Cortney and her mom may have picked NYU for what they thought it offered in possible class mobility and security.  Ironically, at this point they have neither.

All this got me thinking (again) about the attraction of elite tertiary educational institutions.  They enjoy enormous cachet, and conventional wisdom suggests that attending them opens up opportunities that not all college (or law school) graduates enjoy.  (But see this recent study in the context of law school admissions).   In fact, two studies suggest that the eliteness of one's undergraduate degree has relatively little effect on future earnings.

But salary is only one measure of success.  Another is what a degree from an elite college does, both short-term and long-term, to open doors via alumni networks, public perception, and so forth.  One such door is that to graduate and professional school admission.  As progressive law professors, we are supposed to be sensitive to privilege and at least somewhat intentional about not re-creating it.  Yet if  we give too much weight to elite undergraduate degrees in the law school admissions process we are very often doing just that.

Admissions at any given law school is, in fact, a zero sum game, so we may close doors to graduates of less elite schools, often public colleges and universities (the eliteness of which varies greatly from state to state), if we uncritically favor graduates of their elite counterparts.  In the context of grad and professional school admissions, we should bear in mind that it is often the graduates of public institutions of higher education--where annual tuition may be just a couple thousand dollars, in contrast to an elite school's $50,000--who most need the boost grad or professional school would confer in terms of class mobility.  Further, while the tendency may be to see state school grads as lacking vision and ambition, we could instead view them as models of prudence and sound financial judgment.  Particularly when a student is from a lower socioeconomic stratum and/or is first generation to get to college, s/he may have grown up with enormous financial insecurity.  We should appreciate the courage and drive it has taken for him/her to make the investment of time and money just to get that degree, to take that initial step up the mobility ladder.  We should appreciate this even more, of course, if the student has performed well.  Expecting such students to have the added "confidence" to have spent tens (even hundreds) of thousands of extra dollars to get a degree from an elite institution--and to judge the student unfavorably against those who have--overlooks critical context and invites folly.

Cross-posted at SALTLaw.Blog

Progressive law professors talk a lot about privilege, including white privilege.  If we're white (like I am), we try to be aware of it and not re-create it.  Law professors of color remind us that we benefit from it.

Writing about rural people in relation to the law, which I have been doing for a few years now, has put me in an awkward position in relation to white privilege.  A lot of my work is about rural disadvantage and class, and I've been told my work is "very white."  The presumption about whiteness in my work is probably because rural places are popularly associated with stasis and homogeneity—and with white people in particular.  But I’ve written a lot about the sort of entrenched, inter-generational poverty that defines what the U.S. government labels persistent poverty, and the reality is that most persistent poverty counties are dominated by a cluster of a single racial/ethnic group:  Latina/o (Rio Grande Valley), African American (the Mississippi Delta and Black belt), American Indian (the Great Plains and Southwest) and, yes, white (Appalachia, the Ozarks plateau, the Texas panhandle).  A few of my articles have discussed racial and ethnic minorities in rural and/or persistent poverty contexts; examples are here, here and here.

Winter's Bone movie poster (source)

I have also written about impoverished rural white communities, and I do admit to being concerned about them, too.  Which brings me to Ree Dolly, 17-year-old heroine of “Winter's Bone,” the critically acclaimed indie film that won the Grand Jury Prize for Drama at Sundance this year.  The film is set in the Missouri Ozarks, about 50 miles from where I grew up in the Arkansas Ozarks, so when it began to garner media attention in the run up to its national release, I found myself holding my breath.  Who and what would it show—and how authentic would the depiction be?  Was “Winter’s Bone” going to be the 21st century “Deliverance”?  In fact, “Winter’s Bone” is pretty ugly, a very difficult film to watch.  It is also, I must admit, quite authentic in its depiction of a certain milieu.

Indeed, one of the very interesting things about reading NYT readers' responses to "Winter's Bone" and its review is the extent to which those from major metro areas—say New York and Toronto—criticized the film maker for the lack of reality and the way she maligned the place by showing junk cars and dogs in people's yards.  Film goers and readers from the Ozarks, however, generally agreed that the film was quite authentic in its depiction of people and place, though several of them pointed out that it showed only a particular stratum of that society.  These differing views make me wonder if urbanites want to believe that rural life couldn’t be that bad?  If they are clinging nostalgically to bucolic rural myths?

I could offer many other observations about "Winter's Bone," but I want to focus here on how little benefit Ree experiences by virtue of her whiteness. White privilege looks pretty anemic for this young woman trying to save her family home after her meth-cooking father does a runner from the law, having put the house up for security with the bail bondsman.  Ree’s mother checked out long ago, so Ree is responsible for her young siblings.  They sometimes go hungry, and they live in what most would consider squalor.  They survive off $20 a relative hands to Ree here or there, occasional help from a neighbor, and the squirrels they hunt.  There is no sign of a government safety net.  At one point, Ree considers joining the military because it is her only apparent option for saving the family homestead—thanks to the $40K bonus she could get for enlisting.  That plan is dashed when the recruiter tells her she can't take her siblings with her.  College is nowhere on Ree's horizon—if, that is, she is able to finish high school given the weight of her many responsibilities.

White privilege is, of course, notoriously invisible, but maybe it is especially difficult to discern in Ree's world because everyone around her is white—and those in her circle of family and friends are all poor.  Ree attends Forsyth High School (by far the most salubrious locale depicted in the film) in Forsyth, Missouri, population 1,686.  Forsyth is the county seat of Taney County (embarrassingly named for Justice Roger Taney, author of Dred Scott!), population 39,703.  Forsyth is 98.6% white, while Taney County is 96.2% white.  Taney County is not a persistent poverty county, although neighboring Ozark County is.  (These stats are from the 2000 Census; the 2006-2008 ACS estimates show greater racial diversity and considerable population growth for Taney County; its largest city is Branson, the popular tourist destination).

In this setting, class is the primary axis of disadvantage/privilege.  And I'm not talking about the difference between upper middle class and lower middle class.  I'm talking about the range that runs from lower middle class to poor to dirt poor—down to what some call “white trash,” those Matt Wray has labeled “not quite white.”  If the sheriff is going to harass someone, for example, it’s going to be on the basis of class and who the “usual suspects” are.  Racial profiling isn't the issue in homogeneous rural communities, where law enforcement officers are socially integrated with those whom they police; far more influential factors are who you and your kin are.

So what can we take away from Winter’s Bone regarding white privilege?  I see Ree’s life as a reminder that when you get “down” to a certain socioeconomic stratum, there is precious little privilege or material benefit associated with being white.  (I’m thinking the film “Monster” also illustrates this point). Another way of stating this is that disadvantages associated with class (e.g., bias against “white trash”) and geography (e.g., scarcity of jobs and opportunities) seriously undermine the white privilege that Ree might enjoy in other settings.

When the relevant universe of people are all white (Ree Dolly in the context of Forsyth, Missouri—and I acknowledge that it’s difficult to truly isolate the “local” for these purposes), whiteness presumably takes a backseat to class (and I’m actually talking here about more than just money), which looms much larger.  Unfortunately, “Winter's Bone” fails to depict class difference in Forsyth in any explicit way.  For all we know from the film, everyone in Forsyth lives like Ree and the Dolly clan.  (Oh, and according to the film, the sun literally never shines in an Ozarks winter—overkill on the part of the filmmaker if you ask me; further, absolutely nothing in the film has the moderately pleasant glow of the image in the movie's poster, but I digress).

In my next installment, I will discuss how Ree might fare outside Forsyth and Taney County, in a more diverse setting, such as a college or university.

Cross-posted to SALTLaw Blog and Legal Ruralism.

I've been contemplating a series on "Elitism in Education," but the posting of a new paper by Richard Sander and Jane Yakowitz  prompted me to change the title to "Elitism and Education."  That's because their new study, "The Secret of My Success:  How Status, Prestige and School Performance Shape Legal Careers," suggests that an elite law school education is not as important to a successful legal career as conventional wisdom suggests.  The draft paper is not yet peer reviewed, but here's a summarizing excerpt:

The consistent theme we find throughout this analysis is that performance in law school--as measured by law school grades--is the most important predictor of career success.  It is decisively more important than law school 'eliteness.'  Socioeconomic factors play a critical role in shaping the pool from which law students are drawn, but little or no discernible role in shaping post-graduate careers.  Since the dominant conventional wisdom says that law school prestige is all important, and since students who 'trade up' in school prestige generally take a hit to their school performance, we think prospective students are getting the wrong message.

Sander is, of course, well known for arguing that black law students are not well served by affirmative action when it places them in law schools where their numerical entering credentials (LSAT and UGPA) are significantly poorer than those of their classmates.   He has also asserted that affirmative action hurts blacks in the context of hiring by large law firms when blacks have lower law school GPAs than their white counterparts.  He maintains that this "handicaps" them "substantially in the the big law 'tournament,' plausibly leading to much higher attrition and lower rates of partnership attainment."  Sander and Yakowitz explain that one purpose of this new study is to respond in part to skepticism that Sander's prior article generated regarding the link between law school grades and career success.

I want to focus here on the new study's insights into class (im)mobility, what Sander and Yakowitz refer to as SES (socioeconmic status).  Here's the bad news:

On the one hand, law students come predominantly from upper-middle- and upper-class backgrounds.  This was true fifty years ago and continues to be true today--to almost exactly the same degree.  Whatever is necessary to shape the credentials and desire necessary to end up in law school, it is distributed  in ways that correlate strongly with most conventional measures of social eliteness.

Elsewhere they expand on this (p. 12 of the draft):

[H]alf of all students at elite schools in the 'After the JD' dataset (who generally began law school in 1996 or 1997) had parents with occupational levels that put them in the top 10% of American households; only ten percent had SES backgrounds that put them in the bottom half of the American distribution.  As in the Warkow-Davis analysis [from the 1960s], students at less elite schools are more socially heterogeneous ...  The similarity across time is striking; if anything, it is perhaps fair to infer that the most elite schools have become more SES-elite over time, while the least elite schools in the spectrum are a bit more socially heterogeneous than their 1961 counterparts.

So, if someone is  just breaking into the professional/managerial class by getting a legal education, chances are very good s/he is doing so at a non-elite school.   This is not terribly surprising because, as Sander and Yakowitz point out, getting into law school as a function of  (a) who is in the pool of college graduates; (b) who wants to go to law school and believes they can finance it; and (c) who has sufficiently high LSAT and UGPA credentials.   Those from lower SES strata--especially if they are white--may not "look good on paper" to more elite schools.   Indeed, those from working class families may not even apply to higher ranked schools.  (Hard as it is for people who are in the know to believe, some prospective law students may not have "gotten the memo" about going to the best law school that will accept you.  Here is my own account of being a law school applicant from a working-class family).  They may choose non-elite law schools if and when those schools are less expensive, both in terms of tuition and in terms of requiring a move.   I wonder, for example, how many law students from working-class backgrounds attend local law schools with night programs.

If Sander and Yakowitz are correct that the power of law school eliteness is over-rated as a career maker, this is (somewhat ironically) especially good news for lower SES folks because they are particularly unlikely to get an elite legal education.

Now for the (other) good news:

[T]he role of social eliteness in shaping lawyer careers after law school  has changed dramatically over the past two generations.  Whereas in the 1960s, social class, proper 'connections' and religion all played influential roles in shaping the types of legal careers available to law graduates, those factors do not seem to bear the same significance today.

Sander and Yakowitz go on to depict in Table 2 (based on After the JD data) how factors reflecting family capital (e.g., "lawyers in the family," "one or both parents are supervisors," "family helped with career strategy," "family was very important for obtaining first job") relate to a lawyer's median income.  I was admittedly shocked to see that among  7 such factors, only "lawyers in the family"was a positive indicator for a higher median salary.  Six other factors correlate with lower median salary, while a final one that might suggest a lack of family capital, "both parents are immigrants," had no apparent impact on salary.

But therein lies a serious limitation of the Sander and Yakowitz study:  Salary is their principal measure of success, with some references also to law firm partnership.   Other lower-paid but prestigious and powerful legal career paths are not acknowledged as markers of success.  Also, I would like to see Sander and Yakowitz attempt to assess the influence of aspects of social capital that are not directly related to a lawyer's family of origin.

Here is something else Sander and Yakowitz appear to overlook.  The salaries of lawyers who earn more money in spite of lack of family capital may do so because earning a higher salary is more important to them than other metrics for or manifestations of success.  Even assuming those from SES disadvantaged backgrounds are proportionately represented among those who earn good grades in law school, that number is really very small.  This group in particular may be more highly compensated than some of their counterparts from more privileged backgrounds because the former place a premium on making money, which gets reflected in their career trajectory.  A higher income may be more important to the lawyer who has transcended class boundaries precisely because s/he grew up with less (if any) financial security.   A lawyer from an upper-middle or upper-class background who has always known financial stability (and may enjoy the benefit of family financial reserves) may feel freer to choose the more rewarding or "alternative" law career path, even if the compensation is not so handsome.

So, this study brings some good news regarding class mobility for those in lower SES strata who have an undergraduate degree, "want to go to law school and believe they can finance it" (an increasingly Herculean task given the skyrocketing cost of higher education)--especially if they get good grades.  The devastating news is how few such people actually wind up in law school.  Sander and Yakowitz's study indicates remarkably little SES upward mobility as reflected in actually getting the SES disadvantaged into law schools and therefore out into the legal profession.  The reasons for that are surely worth further study.

Cross-posted to SALTLaw Blog.

Photo © Lisa R. Pruitt 2010

The closing line of my recent blog post asked: "Is even democracy a luxury for the poor?"

Shortly after writing it, I came across this quote by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, featured in the obituary of Senator Robert C. Byrd who died last week. Regarding the vast federal aid that Byrd garnered for West Virginia over the years, Rockefeller said Byrd knew that “before you can make life better, you have to have a road to get in there, and you have to have a sewerage system.”

This comment resonated with me, struck me as accurate. Yet it ran counter to my thinking about Robert C. Byrd for the past few decades. While I have always considered Byrd a fine man (well, aside from his Klan membership as a younger man) and appreciated his dedication to the Senate, I saw him primarily as a poster child for the excesses of pork barrel politics. Rarely was he in the news, it seems, without some mention of the federal aid he was able to channel to West Virginia. Indeed, his obituary in the New York Times states that he built, "always with canny political skills, a modern West Virginia with vast amounts of federal money." Elsewhere, it includes this quote from Senator Byrd himself, “I lost no opportunity to promote funding for programs and projects of benefit to the people back home.” He referred to West Virginia as "one of the rock bottomest of states."

Rockefeller's comment, however, reminded me of what was at stake with all that aid for West Virginia. It was not only welcome centers and courthouses and such. It was the state's development from an economic backwater, which requires roads and bridges. As Rockefeller observed, advanced sanitation makes a big difference, too. Indeed, it goes hand in hand with education and other health and human services in enhancing the state's human capital.

The quote from Rockefeller also reminded me of this provocative line from Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger (2008): "If I were making a country, I'd get the sewage pipes first, then the democracy." The White Tiger is a story from the other side of the world—from India—but it is related to what Byrd tried to do for West Virginia in several senses. The Indian story—like the story of many West Virginians—is about rural poverty. Its social, geographic, and economic context is the uneven development that has left rural India's residents behind while much of the rest of the nation zooms ahead in the name of progress (and, of course, capitalism). Parallels to rural West Virginia are apparent.

Photo by McKay Savage

We city dwellers don't think much about sewage pipes. We take them for granted. But lots of people in the U.S. and in India don't have them. Indeed, some don't even have clean water. (Read U.S. stories here and here.) When those living in metropolitan areas fret about roads, it is about getting a car pool lane, or sound walls, or even a whole new freeway. In rural areas, residents fret about how to get your (dirt) road graded, never mind getting it paved. (Read stories about the economic significance of road building in India, too, here and here).

Both the Rockefeller and Adiga quotes suggest the power of government to lift people out of poverty—perhaps even the nation state's duty to do so. If we agree that the government should play a role in responding to deprivation, is it fair for West Virginia to get more federal aid (assuming that it does on, say, a per capita basis) than, for example, Pennsylvania or Washington or Florida? Wouldn't it represent distributive equity to give West Virginia and similarly deprived states more? Of course, the Indian Constitution recognizes some socio-economic rights, e.g., the right to life, which has been construed to obligate the state to provide a certain healthcare and education infrastructure. The U.S. Constitution makes no similar provision, protecting only civil and political rights. (Yet, as Robert Byrd once pointed out, "The Constitution does not prohibit humble servants from delivering whatever they can to their constituents").

Constitutional and other legal mandates aside, the question remains: what should government do in the face of grossly uneven development and the resulting spatial inequalities in access to infrastructure and services? What is just and ethical? I've been writing recently about Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum's capabilities framework for assessing well-being, including their thinking about government's role in endowing residents with core capabilities such as those life and bodily health. I'm recalling Sen's use of the phrase "antecedent inequality" to justify giving more to those with less, to raise them to a sort of parity with the "haves." That has me reflecting on Robert Byrd's career a little differently than I previously had. I'm now wondering: is it really "pork" if it responds to antecedent inequalities? If getting sewage pipes into rural places—be they in West Virginia or India—helps rural residents achieve a minimum level of well-being, shouldn't we be doing it?

To circle back to democracy for a moment, consider this quote from Sen about the very nature of development:

Development consists of the removal of various types of unfreedoms that leave people with little choice and little opportunity of exercising their reasoned agency.

That leaves me wondering: At what point are citizens so deprived of what they need to survive—what Nussbaum refers to the as the life and bodily health capabilities—that they are effectively incapable of exercising the civil and political rights so valued by liberal democracies. Isn't the lack of sewage pipes and other basic infrastructure an "unfreedom" that cries out for development—whether in India or West Virginia?

Cross posted to SALTLaw.org/blog and Legal Ruralism.

Polling place at Murray, Arkansas
Photo © 2010 Lisa R. Pruitt

I've thought about vote buying a lot over the course of my life.   I'm not talking about how corporations and other affluent actors donate money to campaigns in hopes of swaying legislators' votes, or even lower-scale political patronage type activity.  I'm talking about the phenomenon at the individual level in what is arguably its most base and disturbing form:  The payment and acceptance of cold hard cash for one's vote in a particular political race or slate of races.

I've been thinking about vote buying again lately because I discussed it a bit in this recent essay and because a friend from Kentucky mentioned that, in the wake of the state's May 18 primary, federal investigations into vote buying are underway in several counties in the Eastern part of the state.  (Read some  news coverage of those investigations here and here.  Also, here's another interesting Kentucky story from earlier this decade.)

My interest in vote buying goes back to my childhood.  My father was involved in vote buying in the rural Arkansas county where I grew up, and he was quite open it.  I recall rather vividly one election night when he and other local men gathered at our kitchen table with the paper ballots cast that day.   If memory serves me well, they were checking to see if various people had, in fact, voted as they had been paid to do.   This was in the 1970s and 1980s in rural Arkansas, where people still cast paper ballots; in fact, I think they still do in Newton County.  My father was a life-long Democrat who bought votes on behalf of the party's local candidates, but the local Republicans engaged in the practice, too.  Indeed, the Newton County Judge (in Arkansas, the county judge is the chief elected administrative officer) was convicted of vote buying in the late 1980s and spent some time in federal prison.  U.S. v. Campbell, 845 F.2d 782 (8th Cir. 1988).

I recall questioning my mother about the hows and whys of this practice in the same way that my son now questions me about the hows and whys of things like why people don't fall out of roller coasters and what the sky is made of.   She couldn't answer all of my questions any more satisfactorily than I can answer those of my child, but some of the questions and answers included these:

• Where did my father and his cronies get the money to buy the votes?  I knew none of the people doing the buying were wealthy, and most--like my family--lived pretty much hand to mouth.  Were they spending their own money?  If so, what benefit did they get from electing the county judge or sheriff of their choice?  Getting the nearest dirt road graded came up a lot in my mom's answers to this one, which suggests that vote buying is, in part, an exercise in political patronage.  It simply bypasses campaign finance.   
• How could the vote buyer be certain that the vote seller actually delivered his or her vote?  I later understood the paper ballot system and its numbering better.  This wikipedia entry suggests other ways in which votes were and are verified.  So much for the secret ballot!  In the Campbell case, the voter simply turned her absentee ballot over to the buyer.
• How many votes did you have to buy to sway an election?  In a county where only a few thousand votes are cast in county-wide elections, not that many.  As far as I could tell, most vote buying was focused on local races, as for sheriff, assessor.
• How much did a vote cost?   Not much, apparently.  I recall my mom telling me that it was as little as $5 or $10.  According to the report in the Campbell case, the defendant bought various citizens' votes for as little as $30 each.  Some folks held out for as much as $50.  This story suggests a range of $10-$50 in eastern Kentucky, sometimes accompanied by whiskey or beer.
• Why would anyone ever sell his or her vote?  As a young person, I was capable of great righteous indignation about various things, and vote buying was one of them.  I must have taken civics class very seriously because I was truly outraged that anyone would sell his or her constitutionally endowed right to have a say in our great democracy.  And yes, I also condemned the vote buyers. 

Now that I've been studying rural poverty for several years--especially the sort of persistent poverty that marks counties like the one in which I was raised (see a map of all persistent poverty counties in the U.S. here and note that 340 of the 386 of them are nonmetro)--I'm starting to see that the answer isn't (or isn't only) that  those selling their votes (or for that matter buying them) don't share my vision of citizenship and democracy.  It may well be that those selling their votes actually need the money--I mean, really need the money.  Yes, even $10--never mind $50--may make a big difference in their lives, at least for that month.

A recent visit to my mom in Arkansas and seeing the film "Winter's Bone" have both served to remind me of the value of a $20 bill in the rural Ozarks.

All of this leaves me wondering:  Is even democracy a luxury for the poor?

Cross-posted to SALTLaw.org/blog and Legal Ruralism. 

Parthenon General Store, Parthenon, Arkansas
(not a Census Designated Place and has no Wikipedia entry)
Photo © Lisa R. Pruitt

I started writing about rural people and places in relation to the law a few years ago, motivated in part by their near total absence from legal scholarship.  I grew up in a very rural corner of Arkansas, where most of my family of origin still lives, and it struck me that lives like theirs (and formerly mine) were largely unseen and unacknowledged by legal actors at scales other than the most local (and sometimes even by those, e.g, the Sheriff).  Rural residents comprise nearly 20% of our nation's population, but they are a forgotten fifth whose lives are in many ways different to what has become a presumptive but rarely expressed urban norm in legal scholarship.   (Katie Porter's work on bankruptcy in rural contexts is an important exception).  I started studying the legal relevance of rurality about a decade ago, and I have found so much to say that I have published only within the sub-discipline I call "law and rural livelihoods" since 2006.   I expect to spend the rest of my career exploring rural people as legal subjects and rural places as context, even if it sometimes feels as if I am writing my way into the very obscurity associated with rurality itself.

It is not surprising, then, that as a consumer of legal scholarship I find myself looking for rural people, for acknowledgment of rural difference, rural context, rural society.  Of course, rural-urban difference is not relevant to every legal issue or every piece of legal scholarship, but from time to time I come across a law review article that seems to cry out for some acknowledgment of rurality.   That happened last week when I saw on ssrn.com an essay by Jonas Lerman titled "Food Fights and Food Rights:  Legislating the 'Delicious Revolution.'"  Lerman's abstract states in part:

This Essay explores some of the civil rights and human rights dimensions of American food policy.  In particular, the Essay examines the weaknesses in America’s school lunch programs, and the problem of “food deserts” – the dearth of grocery stores and farmers’ markets in

America’s poor and nonwhite urban neighborhoods. These are complex problems, involving powerful agricultural interests, difficult public health questions, urban planning, and civil rights.

This is a nicely written manuscript about important issues that get surprisingly little attention in legal scholarship:  agricultural policy, food, and child nutrition.  But I was surprised and disappointed that in 51 pages, Lerman does not use the word "rural" a single time.   Nor does he use the word "nonmetropolitan."  The word "urban," on the other hand, appears thirteen times (more if you count the footnotes).  He talks about farmers' markets, farm policy, the Farm Bill, Farmer Barack, and occasionally plain old farmers,  but he doesn't mention the fact that a whole lot of food is grown in rural and/or nonmetropolitan areas.  He talks about what is good for cities and urban children without acknowledging rural children, their families, their nutritional needs or their communities.

On the one hand, Lerman's use of the modifier "urban" can be seen as progress.   That is, by specifying urban people and contexts, he is at least not pretending to refer to all children when his real focus is those who live in cities.  There is precision and honesty in this.  Unlike many legal scholars, he is not merely assuming the urban; he's expressing it.

Now, I do understand that urban ag, slow food, and Alice Waters are hot topics these days.  I also appreciate that even (or especially!) law review articles need a little marketing.  Still, given that food insecurity and child obesity are as much rural problems as urban ones and given agriculture's importance to rural economies, I would expect rurality might play at least a cameo role somewhere in the discussion.  (Read more about rural food insecurity and food deserts here,  here, and here.)

A few days after seeing Lerman's essay, I came across Katharine Baird Silbaugh's article,  "Sprawl, Family Rhythms and the Four-Day Work Week."   Rural people and places are more visible here, even garnering a mention in the abstract.  Here's an excerpt:

This Article seeks to highlight some of the institutional practices that influence the adoption of a four-day work week, particularly those associated with sprawl. It compares the reform to school districts that operate a four-day school week as a cost-saving measure. School systems choose a four-day week because they are rural and long distances create particularly serious time and transportation costs. This comparison helps to reveal the role sprawl and its impact on commutes plays in the four-day work week reform.

Professor Silbaugh uses "sprawl" as it is most commonly used now, to refer to a metropolitan phenomenon.  Fair enough.  Of course, the word sprawl is also an accurate descriptor of the lay of the land in rural areas.  That is, one defining characteristic of rurality is low population density--residents far flung across often vast spaces.  Kudos to Professor Silbaugh for seeing this link and acknowledging what might be seen as a rural "solution" to dealing with spatially dispersed populations:  the four-day school week.  What Professor Silbaugh doesn't do (presumably because her focus is the role that "urban sprawl plays in generating worker demand for a compressed work week and citizen demand for extended service hours") is acknowledge that the four-day work week (along with the upsides and downsides she identifies) would have similar impacts on rural families.  Not only must rural children traverse great distances to get to school, rural women (and men) must traverse them to get to work.  In fact, the rate at which rural mothers work outside the home is higher than that for their urban counterparts!  Read more here.

Of course, I appreciate (and greatly enjoy myself) the latitude that legal scholars enjoy to define their research agendas and to state the parameters of each article.  It's easy for a reader to say, "but what about ...."   Those "what about" questions can can go on endlessly, and they get in the way of the laudable goal of writing shorter law review articles.  Nevertheless, some legal issues cry out for an acknowledgment of rural difference.   Authors might ask how a given law would affect rural residents?  or whether a law would operate in the same way in rural places?

Taking our nation's rural population seriously is perhaps too much to ask as we move into the second decade of an increasingly metro-centric 21st century.  But we could at least acknowledge the very existence of rural people and places more often than we do.  In the context of legal scholarship, surely the rural experience is worth at least an occasional law review footnote.  Progressive legal scholars, who generally seek to be inclusive, could start with that.

Cross-posted at SALTLaw.org/blog.