Who's Afraid of Rural Poverty? The Story Behind America's Invisible Poor

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12149
• Author: Lauren Gurley
• Published date: 01 May 2016
• Date: 01 May 2016

Who’s Afraid of Rural Poverty? The Story

Behind America’s Invisible Poor

By LAUREN GURLEY

ABSTRACT. Rural poverty and rural issues in general remain invisible in

the United States to the urban majority. Rural sociologists have tried to

raise these issues, but even in the field of sociology, they have been

sidelined for several generations. Progressives treat urban poverty with

sympathy and rural poverty with contempt because the latter is

stereotyped as a problem that afflicts only white families, who are then

blamed for failings of the economy as a whole. In fact, persistent rural

poverty is concentrated in pockets in Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta,

and several other regions, many of which are inhabited by blacks,

Hispanics, and Native Americans. Nevertheless, it seems that making

rural poverty as much a concern among progressive Democrats as

urban poverty has been will require a different political orientation

towards rural issues. Such an approach was visible briefly during

Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, but it has had little

influence on other candidates for high office.

Introduction

Within the popular American conscience—arguably a close reflection

of the mainstream media—there are two favored focal points for discus-

sing the problem of poverty. The first is within the urban, inner-city

context—often conflated with black poverty—which has played a criti-

cal role in American political and cultural discourse throughout most of

the past century. The second is the poverty of the Global South: Sub-

Saharan Africa, Latin America, South Asia, and the poverty of migrants

between these regions and industrialized countries.

What seldom gets talked about—and when it is, often with irreverent

humor and contempt—is thepoverty of rural America, particularly rural

white America: Appalachia, the Ozarks,the Mississippi Delta, the Dako-

tas, the Rio Grande Valley, the Cotton Belt.

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 75, No. 3 (May, 2016).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12149

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C2016 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

If you spend time among coastal liberals, it’s notunusual to hear den-

igrating remarks made about poor “middle Americans” slip out of

mouths that are otherwise forthcoming about the injustices of poverty

and inequality.

Yet, since the 1950s, Americans living in non-metropolitan counties

have had a higher rate of poverty than those living in metropolitan

areas. The poverty rate among rural-dwelling Americans is 3 percent

higher than it is among urban-dwellers. In the South, the poorest region

of the country, the rural-urban discrepancy is greatest—around 8 per-

cent higher in non-metro areas than metro areas (USDA-ERS 2015).

So why is the poverty of rural America largely unexamined, even

avoided? There are a number of explanations.

Sociology and its Urban Bias

Lack of interest in the United States in the poverty of its own pastoral

lands can be traced across the Atlantic Ocean, to the origins of social sci-

ences in academia. In the 18

th

century, French, German, and English

Enlightenment thinkers penned the foundational texts of social analysis.

The Industrial Revolution followed close behind, and as peasants

flooded into cities from the countryside, these disciplines further

cemented themselves into the academy. Responding to rapid urbaniza-

tion, the leading social theorists of the era—Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim,

and Max Weber—were primarily concerned with living conditions in

cities and industrializing societies, setting the foundation for the metro-

centrism that continues to characterize the social sciences today.

As Linda Lobao (2015), a professor of rural sociology at Ohio State

University, notedin an interview:

In academia, there’s an urban bias throughout all research, not just pov-

erty research. It starts with where these disciplines originated—they

came out of the 1800s—[when] theorists were preoccupied with the

movement from a rural sort of feudal society to a modern, industrial soci-

ety. The old was rural and feudal and agricultural and the new was the

industry and the city.

Similarly, the advent of the study of poverty in sociology departments

across the United States during the Progressive Era centered nearly

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology590