Alabama not exactly a world away
“Big wheels keep on turning, carry me home to see my kin,” is the opening line of Lynyrd Skynyrd's 1970s rock classic Sweet Home Alabama.
Although the band wasn’t from Alabama, the song’s fierce defence of the South and Southerners stands to this day as a “don’t tread on me” anthem against Neil Young and anybody else who would put down ol’ Dixie.
The language of the lyrics is precise, starting with the word kin, which has all but disappeared from common use in North American English except for the phrase next of kin when notifying individuals about a death in the family. In the deep South, however, kin is still a common word used to describe not only blood relatives but also that extended family of friends and neighbours that people have known for their entire lives.
For the hundreds of thousands of almost exclusively white and mostly male voters who nearly elected Roy Moore to the U.S. Senate on Tuesday, kin was likely top of mind when they cast their ballot.
There is no other rationale to support a retired judge who was kicked off the Alabama Supreme Court bench twice for refusing to follow federal law, who openly hates gays and Muslims, who links a better time in American history to slavery and, of course, that’s all on top of the credible accounts by more than a dozen Alabama women that he preyed on them when he was in his 30s and they were teenage girls.
Even if white Alabama voters believed part or all of the stories about Moore, they voted for him anyway because he is their kin and his many faults do not disqualify him from kinship loyalty.
J.D. Vance’s excellent memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, offers a glimpse into that worldview, chronicling his tumultuous childhood in Midtown, Ohio, the descendent of poor, isolated Kentucky hillbillies. Vance describes the rage he feels to this day, even though he’s a Yale Law School graduate working in San Francisco, towards city slickers with their flat accents, big words, pretentious airs and crude stereotypes of people who sound like him, come from where he comes from and hold social, cultural and political views like his own.
Seen from Vance’s perspective, it’s easy to appreciate the resentment of white Alabama residents towards condescending media coverage about them, delivered by carpetbagging journalists who don’t dress or talk like them but report about them as if they understand them and their beliefs.
They know they are being laughed at, like last week, when an interview between Moore supporter Ted Crockett and CNN’s Jake Tapper went viral online and across social media. Crockett confirmed the country bumpkin stereotype when Tapper informed him that any elected politician, anywhere in the United States, including the president, doesn’t have to use the Christian Bible to take the oath of office but can use any book they like, according to their faith. There’s Crockett, slackjawed and silent for several embarrassing seconds, unable to comprehend the idea of anyone saying “so help me God” to a deity other than his.
White Alabamians must be so tired being forever shamed by others about racism and slavery and George Wallace and Rosa Parks and Selma and desegregation and the Baptist Church bombing.
There is no difference, however, between them and the white Prince George and area residents tired hearing about residential schools and the Highway of Tears, outraged that Fort George Park becoming Lheidli T’enneh Memorial Park, furious about “traditional territory” and “land claims,” dismissive of “politically correct” words like Indigenous and First Nations, angry about the invasion of Muslim refugees and frustrated with the lack of recognition and respect from Ottawa, Victoria and Vancouver.
Even from Prince George, the road is a short one to Alabama, to a place where kinship and loyalty are honourable concepts used to whitewash history, to excuse intolerance, to oppress people of colour, to glorify hate and to justify supporting a racist, homophobic child predator that anyone with a shred of decency would be ashamed of knowing, never mind voting for.
By the slimmest of margins, Alabama made the right political choice last week, but how close the vote was simply showed far too many of its white male residents remain willfully ignorant and proud of it.