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April 14, 2011

Studying societal details can reveal info missing from broader view

Kathleen Blee

Kathleen Blee

Studying society through a zoom lens, rather than a panoramic one, can reveal social mechanisms and dispel stereotypes that otherwise are difficult to see, a Pitt expert said last week.

“Often we tend to think of smaller units of social life as more simple, with complexity added through aggregation: Like how a village seems less complicated than a nation,” said Kathleen Blee, who spoke on “Looking Small to See the Big Picture: Explaining Feudists, Racists and Grassroots Activists,” in a lecture that focused on three of Blee’s research studies.

“Actually, the complexity of social life may be more visible at a small scale and becomes increasingly obscure at more aggregated levels. Looking at the very smallest aspect of social life can shed light on big questions of society,” said Blee April 7, on the occasion of her installation by Provost Patricia Beeson as Distinguished Professor of Sociology.

“I would like to show that there really is some kind of thread that connects the very different subjects, places and time periods I’ve studied, from Appalachian feuding families in the 19th century to racist groups across the United States in the 20th century and now to grassroots activists in Pittsburgh in the 21st century,” Blee said.

Feudists in Appalachia

Although the late 19th century was a time of widespread violence across the United States, including riots, mob actions, labor struggles and racial lynchings, a special stigma was attached — unjustly, Blee believes — to the violence associated with Appalachia.

The popular media of the time singled out Appalachia as a region of particular and peculiar violence. The region was alternately branded in the press as “one of the few dark spots on the map of the U.S.,” a region where “bloodshed is a pastime,” a “place where the sun sets crimson and the moon rose red,” an area summarized as the “Corsica of America,” she said.

“Popular commentators across the country gave Appalachian violence a name: feuding, and provided an explanation: This is a special kind of conflict whose roots were personal and cultural — maybe even genetic — rather than political,” Blee pointed out.

“For these commentators, Appalachia’s mountain feuds could be traced as traditions of violence wrought by warlike Scots-Irish settlers and perpetrated by decades of cultural and geographical isolation that had shaped the mountaineer, in the words of one writer, as ‘ignorant, shiftless and possessing an awful disregard for human life,’” she said.

Once established, the idea of Appalachia as a region apart was used to explain the forms of violence that erupted there. Using a circular argument, Blee said, “To non-local writers, traditional, irrational forms of violence not only were sustained but were the product of Appalachia. In contrast, the even more violent and extensive campaign of arson, terror and murder by clans of tobacco farmers in parts of western Kentucky a short time later was ascribed to the intricacies of economics and power, not to psychology, genes and place.”

But how does 19th-century Appalachian feuding appear when examined under the zoom lens, “if we look ‘small,’ specifically at one tiny county in the mountains of eastern Kentucky?” Blee asked.

To answer that, she and her team of researchers reconstructed the social, economic and legal history of Clay County, Ky. “Throughout the 19th century, Clay County was renowned to outsiders for the supposed ferocity of its population, described as a land ‘tinged with the blood of the innocent and blackened by reasonless deeds of hate,’” she said.

As The New York Times reported, such violence was synonymous with the location. Appalachia was viewed as a region apart, an isolated, impoverished and particularly violent place and people. “So Clay County was simply a land of feuding hillbillies,” Blee said.

But is that description accurate?

“From the small details in the historical records, we discovered a much different story,” she said.

“First, rather than irrational violence among poor hillbillies, we found that Clay County’s violence was rooted in the clash between two immensely wealthy families, the Garrards and the Whites. They forged their wealth by the manufacture of salt, the exploitation and marketing of clay and the appropriation of massive tracts of land,” Blee said.

Far from poor, these two families belie the stereotype of isolated, ignorant feudists, she said. From their ranks came a governor of Kentucky and a speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Although the popular press portrayed feuds as irrational responses to petty conflicts, the battle between the Garrards and the Whites actually was a rational struggle among entrepreneurs during a time of increasing competition and decline in the salt industry, repeated national fiscal panic and a frenzy of speculative investment in the county’s timber, coal, ash and mineral reserves, Blee said.

“Second, although the families themselves were involved in numerous violent incidents, their wealth and power also gave them the ability to orchestrate violence by others on their behalf,” by pressing people who were dependent on them for protection and survival into violent service, she said.

Third, going against the common assumption that Appalachian people turned to violent means to resolve their disputes only because law enforcement and the legal system were impotent, “we found that the so-called feuding families were consistent and intense litigators in both the civil and criminal courts. Their violence supplemented, rather than substituted for, their courtroom battles,” Blee said.

“What difference does it make that outsiders misinterpreted Clay County’s bloody conflicts? It matters because discourse is power. The construction of Appalachia as a land of feuds had a powerful and profound effect far beyond the stereotypes of the region that linger in popular culture from Li’l Abner to the Beverly Hillbillies,” Blee pointed out.

“Depictions of the Kentucky mountains as a violent subculture paved the way for later efforts to explain and justify the severe poverty into which the region sank as absentee owners claimed property and mineral wealth. Thus, through a small lens trained on the history of a handful of people in a fairly unremarkable place, the mechanisms of power that led to the violent transformation become more visible,” she said.

Organized racist groups

“Through a distant lens, there doesn’t seem to be all that much to explain about people who participate in organized racism, such as in groups like the Ku Klux Klan, white-power skinheads, neo-Nazis or white supremacy groups,” Blee said.

“Each of these groups expresses hostility toward Jews, toward all persons of color and toward non-white immigrants. They all foresee a cataclysmic race war, a final battle of Aryans-against-all, and many of them have plans to hasten it.”

The common assumption is that people join such groups because they hold deeply racist beliefs and want to act on them, or at least they want to be around other people who hold such views.

“I began with the assumption that people join racist groups because they are social outcasts. At first glance, there seems to be little reason to question this,” Blee said.

“Looking through a panoramic lens, virtually all racists look alike. They live on the margins of society. To paint with a broad brush, they often live in trailers and they hold unstable and low-skill jobs. They don’t seem to interact much with anyone outside their tiny racist world. When they talk about their parents or siblings, it’s often with hostility.”

But such explanations put the cart before the horse by using racist groups’ propaganda and public displays to infer why people join them, she said.

“Such descriptions are often taken as causal, that is, we think it’s because people are on the social edge that they’re attracted to racist groups. This fits into a larger stereotype about racial haters, that they’re social drop-outs, that they’re fundamentally different from the rest of us,” Blee said.

However, looking through a zoom lens shows a much different — and far more disturbing — picture, she said.

“We see that their marginality and isolation is often the product, rather than the cause, of their involvement in organized racism. Those who join the Klan or a Nazi gang, not surprisingly, are likely to lose their jobs and to lose their friends and family,” Blee said. “But many of them began in a very different place. Indeed, most of the racists I interviewed had a decent education, were raised in reasonably stable families, were as likely to come from the East Coast or the West Coast as from the South and had held stable jobs before they joined a racist group.”

Thus, members didn’t join the racist group because they lacked social connection; rather, that was a consequence of joining the group, she maintained.

“What we found is that they joined because they were befriended by racist recruiters whom they met in the most ordinary avenues of daily life: at the grocery store; at the park where their kids play; at the doctor’s office,” Blee said. “As they were pulled into this world, they adopted its ideas and they moved toward becoming the stereotype of a Klan or Nazi member that we have in our head.”

Thus, the stereotypical predictors of who will join racist groups — the more psychologically needy, the less educated, the economically unstable or the product of a troubled family — simply are not true, she said.

“Among those I interviewed, less than a quarter did anything to seek out a racist group themselves. Indeed, almost nobody entered a group in the way we might expect by looking for a group where they can express their beliefs. Instead, most fell into racist groups lured by those they met before they had an interest in its ideas,” Blee said her research revealed.

An even more surprising finding, she said, is that racist activists don’t join groups because they’re more racist than other white people.

“Prior to becoming active, almost all of them had a diffused antipathy toward racial minorities, what sociologists call everyday racism. But the intense, comprehensive, action-oriented racist world view is something they only later would adopt,” Blee said.

“Many people I interviewed — and these were hardcore racists in the country’s most dangerous groups — did not stand out in their racism from other white people in their town or their school or their family before they got involved with a group. They admit this, and the people who knew them before they joined confirm it. Instead, they develop the racist and anti-Semitic ideas of organized racism once they started hanging out with the group.”

Why does it matter that we know how people join racist groups?

“It matters because if fairly ordinary whites can be transformed into avid racists simply by bumping into a racist recruiter in a place they frequent every day, we can’t inoculate people against the lure of organized racism simply by promoting the virtues of tolerance. That confuses cause and effect,” she explained. “Rather, we need to develop a better understanding of how racist groups operate, and to expose how they’re able to recruit members from the most mainstream social settings.”

Emerging grassroots groups

“In this study, we followed over 60 new grassroots activist groups in Pittsburgh from 2003 to 2007. Virtually all of these groups were tiny, rarely attracting a dozen people for meetings, although larger numbers came out for rallies,” Blee said.

The groups represented a wide array of agendas and political persuasions. Some of them were progressive; some were conservative. They tackled a broad range of issues, including the war in Iraq, police brutality, guns, drugs, community violence, same-sex marriage and school reform. A few of these new groups became established, but most of them collapsed or remained fragmented, she said.

“My interest in this study is understanding how activist groups develop what I call the ‘way of being,’ in which some actions or topics seem to be worth considering, while other possibilities are off the table and never considered,” Blee said.

“I’ve also studied emerging groups because the many efforts that fizzle or dissolve or become something else are part of the landscape of modern activism. Activists don’t just work in established organizations with clear agendas and a sense of vision. They spend considerable time in groups that are groping for a focus, that can’t pull themselves together, that accomplish little,” she said.

Focusing only on activist groups that are established truncates what can be concluded. “It makes activism seem successful because we study successful activism,” Blee explained.

She cited the example of a group she called “Debt Free.”

“This is a group that was formed to pressure the U.S. government to forgive the debt burden of the world’s poorest countries,” Blee said.

The first meeting of the group drew a small number of participants — some knew each others, but most did not — recruited by the group’s founder, a woman named Joyce.

“The meeting began with Joyce’s announcement that they would attract members from a broad array of local business organizations, congregations, social action groups and students. Very quickly, though, this expansive sense of what the group could be narrowed considerably,” Blee noted. “How this happened shows how very small acts can reverberate to produce large effects.”

The founder asked people to introduce themselves. The first person gave her name and her religious affiliation. Following her lead, all the other attendees also identified themselves by their faith, Blee said.

“However, this small act — that members identified themselves by their faith — had large consequences. As the discussion shifted to how to find people to write letters and call legislators, members didn’t follow up on the initial idea of focusing on students and social action groups. Now it was only people in faith congregations who seemed to be possible recruits,” she said. “Other earlier possibilities were never mentioned again, even months later when the group had dwindled to a couple of members and was desperate for new people.”

Furthermore, she said, the group only considered meeting at religious sites, again narrowing its initial broad-based intent.

“They selected a Lutheran church, encouraged the pastor to join them and they immediately deferred to her in their decision-making. They further defined themselves as a faith community by asking the pastor to lead them in prayer whenever feelings of anger or frustration broke out among the members,” Blee said.

“Their path toward a religious and exclusively Christian identity left out others. As they moved further in this direction, more church members were attracted to the group, but non-religious and non-Christian members drifted away,” she said.

Referring back to her earlier study on racists, Blee said, “It is clear that happenstance can matter a lot. Bumping into a Nazi recruiter can be a lynchpin that turns someone’s life from ordinary to extreme. Similarly, in grassroots activism, it can be small, incidental acts, like how a person introduces herself or whether one person comes to a meeting or not that can have broad ramifications on how groups take shape.”

Emphasizing research through zoom-lens details does not imply that panoramic, big-picture studies are not worthwhile, Blee cautioned. “Indeed, a bird’s-eye view can tell us much about a group’s social patterns and how a group changes over time,” she said.

“But paying attention to the intricacies of the small has its place as well, even when the questions are large ones, like how violence can be become epidemic, how organized racism can persist over time or how activism can become self-defeating. For such complex social mechanisms, a small lens can be quite useful.”

—Peter Hart


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