Free Belonging: A Culture of Place by bell hooks Page A

folk justified their anti-poor white color prejudice by saying they did not like them anymore than they liked us, calling them by derogatory names like po pecks, peckerwoods, and po white trash. The disdain with which some black folks regarded poor white folk was definitely an inherited legacy of white supremacist hierarchies.
    Privileged-class white folks looked down on the poor white folks who lived outside the law projecting onto them many of the same negative stereotypes they used to define black people. They defined poor white people as ignorant, lazy, lawless. They talked about the broken down cars in their yards, the trash, the way they littered their world with random objects like mouse droppings. No wonder then that most fully colonized black folks taught how and what to think by imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchs, looked down on poor white folk seeing them as an example of what not to be and become. Black folks were told by the white folks who dominated the poor of all colors that poor white folks were mean, cold hearted, the kind of people you had to stay away from, people who could soil and contaminate you.
    I have written in the book Class Matters about the way in which I witnessed black teenagers mock and ridicule the one poor white female who road the bus to school with us. They taunted her with all the negative stereotypes about poor white folks shouting loudly “she smells” or “she stinks.” She was regarded with disdain and contempt, looked down upon, the way racist white folks of all classes looked down upon black folks. This lone representative of the white working class boarded a bus daily where she often had to sit alone. If there were no seats available next to someone who was not verbally abusive (oftentimes she sat next to me), she would stand, juggling books while holding tightly to the overhead hand rail knowing all the while that if she fell her tormentors would laugh and shout.
    This persecution of an individual poor white girl by a group of black boys and girls revealed the depths of our internalized racism as colonized black people. That internalized white supremacy had taught black folks to regard any white person who would “choose” to come upon us, to be near us, near enough to touch our flesh, with contempt so strong it was akin to hatred. Such a response laid bare the reality of black self-hatred. There is no way we could collectively love ourselves and hate those who were most like us in habits and lifestyle.
    The Kentucky hills I roamed as a child were racially integrated. Since they were outside the realm of the city, they were a location of possibility. Folk who lived there could make their own rules. In that space apart, laws could be broken and boundaries could be transgressed. There, in those lush green hills, the innate wildness of the human animal expressed itself. No wonder then that black and white in those hills feared and fascinated one another.
    Not enough has been written about the psycho history of racism in the United States, the ways in which the traumas that are a consequence of exploitation and oppression leave their mark. When I returned to Kentucky and bought acres of land in the hills, I was surprised that my six siblings (most of whom have lived in dangerous urban environments) expressed fear about living in the hills, fear of the poor white folks who live nearby. To my knowledge none of us has been wounded or assaulted by poor white folks and yet the memory of all those childhood lessons teaching us to see poor whites as the enemy made lasting imprints, marks so deep that some of my siblings say that could not stay a night in these hills. Concurrently, African-American colleagues who teach at the college where I am a distinguished professor in residence in Appalachian Studies, a college with a long legacy of anti-racist activism, warn me, deploying the same language and stereotypes of the past, telling me that it is dangerous for me to think