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Davis beat back CBS but said the planned programme reflected a sense that white people living in poorer communities were blamed for their condition.
“There’s this feeling here like people are looking down on you. Feeling like it’s OK to laugh at you, to pity you. You’re not on the same common ground for comparison as someone who’s better off or living in a better place. That doesn’t mean it’s always true, it just means we feel that burden quickly. We’re primed to react to people we think are looking down on us. That they judge us for our clothes, judge us for our car, judge us for our income, the way we talk,” he said.
“This is the poorest congressional district in the United States. I grew up delivering furniture with my dad. No one ever said they were in poverty. That’s a word that’s used to judge people. You hear them say, I may be a poor man but we live a pretty good life for poor people. People refer to themselves as poor but they won’t refer to themselves as in poverty.”
Karen Jennings encountered the prejudice when she first left Beattyville.
“When I went to Louisville as a teenager to work in Waffle House I had this country accent. They laughed at me and asked if we even had bathrooms where I come from. People here are judged in the bigger cities and they resent that,” she said. “The difference is the cities hide their problems. Here it’s too small to hide them. There’s the drugs, and the poverty. There’s a lot of the old people come in here for food. The welfare isn’t enough. Three girls in my granddaughter’s class are pregnant. This is a hard place to grow up. People don’t hide it but they resent being judged for it.”
[snipped]
