Kentucky Stereotypes Essays

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared an unconditional war on poverty in the United States and the most photographed area was the Appalachia region. Many of the photographs intentional or not, became a visual definition of the Appalachia region. The images have drawn from the poorest areas and people to gain support for the war on poverty, but came to represent the entirety of the region. The point of the Looking at Appalachia project is to explore the diversity of Appalachia and to establish a visual counter point. (Home - Looking at Appalachia.) The three images I am going to analyze are challenge some of the stereotypes put on the Appalachia region. I believe my images challenge the stereotype that all Appalachian people do is work hard, go to church, and don’t have time for anything besides those two things.

Racial stereotypes have always been a serious issue in society. The stereotypes impact many aspects of our life. We more or less get carried away by our perceptions toward race, and judge people in a certain frame unconsciously, as Omi set forth in In Living Color: Race and American Culture. Taken by Hilary Swift, this photo presents an African American woman, waiting for a bus that can take her to the Kitchen of Love, a food pantry that located in Philadelphia aiming to feed people suffering from hunger, where she volunteers. It happens in dawn so it’s still dark outside. The surroundings give us an idea that it should take place in a black neighborhood (Stolberg “Black Voters, Aghast at Trump, Find a Place of Food and Comfort”). The woman is staring at the direction where the bus is coming, with a smile on her face. As a photojournalistic image, this photo is aiming to portrait a kind and helpful African American woman, however, does this photo really “positively” portrait an African American woman?

I have been fortunate enough to travel, and see more than just Appalachia. With being able to travel comes the judgement from others when you tell them where you are from. When I was at cheer camp in high school, I got asked if I wore shoes. Comments like that use to belittle me and made me question my self-worth. The media has made the people of Appalachia out to be people of mountain dew mouth, unintelligent, poor background which is the furthest descriptions of what we really are.

Being known as the region synonymous with destitution and home to some of the pauperized counties in the country, Appalachia has always been hidden from or sort of isolated from the rest of the world because of their geographic location. The people of Appalachia are often seen as unintelligent and less civilized than other Americans as they were less developed and not exposed to the commercial world. Because of

With her West Virginia upbringing and living in a coal town, she was inspired to write about “rednecks” in a more positive way. The main way of her doing so was to bring to light the characters of the novel and their loyalty to family, the land and values. The characters are very relatable, the characters manage to wiggle their way into the reader’s heart. It is easy for the reader to become attached characters and to the issues arising in the book. It is in fact a part of our history, native to Appalachia or

The multidimensional expression “hillbilly” carries different cultural significances throughout the book Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. First, Vance utilizes the term “hillbilly” to refer to the working class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree (3). Second, Vance uses the term hillbilly to refer to a group of people from a specific geographic area, namely the area of the Appalachian Mountains. According to Vance, the area stretches from Alabama to Georgia in the South to Ohio to parts of New York in the north (4). Third, hillbilly indicates the way of life, behavior, or identity of the people of Greater Appalachia.

Diving deeper into my opinions of West Virginia, I thought it would be full of “white trash” people and hillbillies. I picked up a lot of various stereotypes from TV shows about the state that did

When James Lane Allen, who was a teacher in Lexington KY for twelve years, decided to change careers in 1885, traveled to New York to become a writer, while there he was told to “find a definite field and explore it for literacy materials.” (McNeal, 59) Deciding to return to Kentucky, Allen began publishing his works in magazines in 1886, his work primarily focusing on Kentucky as two distinct regions, the civilized Bluegrass Region and the rough Cumberland Mountains.

Another issue is how Native Americans internalize the stereotypes that are forced upon them. In a study conducted by Fryberg, Markus, Oyserman, and Stone (2008), they found three common stereotypes of Native Americans in mass media: Spiritual people who are in tune with nature, warriors, or people with stereotypically bad outcomes, such as alcoholism. It is important to note that not all of these stereotypes are negative, and in fact a few of them are positive. What Fryberg et al. (2008) found, however, was that regardless if the stereotype was seen as positive or negative, all three of those variations caused harm in the form of “students’ feelings of personal and community worth, and achievement-related possible selves” (p. 216). It did

There is no such thing as neutrality; there can be no such thing, as the neutrality of the State in the struggle now going on in this country. The great issue of the times involves the existence of the Constitution which comprehends all the States of the Union, which includes all the States. This theory of neutrality involves the idea of two rightfully existing powers struggling against each other; with which Kentucky have nothing to do.

What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the state of Arkansas? Chances are, that as an Arkansan the thoughts are quite different than those of someone not born or raised here. Hillbilly, redneck, barefoot, and trailer are a just few of the common first words invoked in the minds of “foreigners” by the word Arkansas. In the non-fiction work, Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good Ol' Boys Defined a State, author Brooks Blevins provides readers with his idea of how Arkansas's image began, and then perpetuated over time. He provides several examples of the

This introduction to Kentucky history is a collaboration between the state's leading historian, James C. Klotter, and educational consultant Freda C. Klotter. In five compact chapters, they outline major influences and developments of the frontier, statehood, Civil War, industrial, and modern periods. Seven other chapters are thematic, focusing on Kentucky government, regions and regionalism, agricultural and material culture, commercial transformation, literature and music, and demography. Occasional sidebars document the lives of well-known and anonymous Kentuckians to illustrate economic, social, and cultural themes. A Concise History of Kentucky will be useful to many readers new to the state.

There is a difference between being a southerner and being a redneck. Redneck are considered to be “an uneducated white farm laborer, especially from the South”. The stereotype of people that live in the south being uneducated and unable to carry on a conversation is worse than southerners themselves. There are uneducated people all over the world and yet it all comes back to the south. There are people that are not southerners that meets the stereotype of being dumb and narrow minded. Southerners stereotype northerners just like they stereotype them but that needs to stop. A southerner can be just as well educated and capable as others and still be put down because they are from the south.

People in the south often get stereotyped based off their appearances or the way they act. Most southerners have rituals they follow, but some are just living life. The way Flannery O'Connor deals with the traditional social structure in the South in her fiction shows that it was of major concern to her and was the source of much of her power and humor. O'Connor's exposition of a southern society which values a good, moral person yet struggles to identify Three of her short stories deal with the relationship between Christianity and society in the South: "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," "Good Country People," and "Revelation.”

Performances would exaggerate African American from the region give a poor image of the African Americans from the region (Olson). The African American’s were not the only ethic group effected with the broadcasts across the nation of Barn dance which gave more access to the music the poor representation of the rural culture led to the Identity Hillbilly. This was identity was primarily in the speech and clothing of those individuals in the Appalachian region (Olson). To keep this Identity the musicians were persuaded to keep to the stereotype and speak a certain way or where curtain clothing connected to the rural image (Olson). Appalachian people received slang terms out of this poor image such as “hicks” or Degenerates” (Olson).