Income Inequality in a Factory Town

The song extols the greatness of Dixie. My mom had some college early in her life down in Kentucky. She never finished her education. There was nothing starker than the social and economic divide between the members of the Flint Golf Club and the residents of the Dixieland subdivision. The Grand Trunk Railroad tracks were 50 yards behind my parents' home. They divided Dixieland from the fenced-off golf course. The physical divides of the railroad tracks and the six-foot fence metaphorically represented the class and psychological divides between the haves and the have-nots in my neighborhood. Not everyone in the South End area were white trash and poverty stricken. There were other varieties of working class residents. I just happened to be from a Hillbilly family. There were migrants, northerners, and various varieties of white people. What nearly all of them had in common was they worked as an hourly factory worker for General Motors. There were no black people in the Freeman School District, where I and my brother and sister attended school in the 1960s. I understand the class barrier of the South End of Flint, and one only needs to know the history of the Flint Golf Club. According to club president, former General Mo General Manager Joe Morrison, in the 1950s and 60s, this was considered one of the elite courses in Michigan. You didn't ask to join here, they asked you, unquote. According to the Flint Journal in an article about the history of the Flint Golf Club, it began like most private country clubs do in 1910 as a playground for the wealthiest of clientele. The Flint Journal and a promotional piece for the golf course described the founding members of the club as follows. The club was founded by an impressive group of Flint, A-listers, whose names still labeled the streets and landmarks around the city. The original board of directors and members were J. Dallas Dort, A. G. Bishop, C. M. Begol, Colonel B. Burr, Charles Stuart Montt, W.A. Smith, William C. Durant, K.T. Keller, John J. Rascob, and Alfred Sloane. Some of these people were instrumental in the start of General Motors. This group of founders were all white and very rich, really rich. Charles Stuart Mott was at one time the largest shareholder of General Motors. He was one of the world's richest men. They didn't allow black people or Jewish people to join the club, or I might say they didn't have any Jewish or black people. I didn't mention hillbillies. Rest assured, there were no hillbillies in this group. Those rules delimiting social class and status continued until the late 60s. Leo Seidi, a Jewish beverage distributor, was uh invited to play at the golf course eventually, and he was admitted as the first Jewish member in the late 1960s. Some of us climbed that fence in our teenage years to caddy at the Flint Golf Club in the summer months. We were not allowed anywhere else on the grounds except the caddy shack and on the course. I never saw the inside of the Flint Golf Club until I became a member in the mid-1990s. Ironically, I was sponsored by Leo Saidy. There's no plaque with my name recognizing me as the first Tillbilly member. By then, my job was Genesee County prosecutor. I had moved up in the world. I do look back fondly at the irony of my carrying the golf bag of Martha Jett of Little Rock, Arkansas. She was on the leaderboard of the women's U.S. Junior Golf Championship in the 1960s at the Flint Golf Club. The Flint Golf Club was once host to a PGA tournament, the Carling Open. One of the major reasons we love caddying at the Flint Golf Club is that on Monday they would let us play the course. We became avid golfers, a sport I've continued to play. Growing up in a family of southern migrant working class people has brought awareness that all hillbillies are not the same as the class and marginalization. Even between white hillbillies, there are significant subcultural differences. There's a book called White Trash, and in that book they talk about the obvious cultural divide between the hillbillies' various subcultures. It's an old story in America. After all, we are a nation built by migrants and immigrants from places all over the world. The American divide between the rich and poor reveals its upper economic strata are nearly all white people. The growing gap between the rich and the poor economically is a class and racial or ethnic divide. The majority of the haves and the have-nots are white people. This rich versus poor divide is stunting and shunting and retarding upward mobility in American society, according to economists. Marginalizing whites in American society is not a new phenomenon. Not everything, however, is about economics. Some grievances of the hillbillies I grew up with is about power, guns, and God. Hillary Clinton, while running for president of the United States, labeled Trump's Midwestern migrant working class whites as quote-unquote deplorables. She would surely know, after all, she was, after all, the first lady of Arkansas. That is where my dad and many hillbillies came from to work in the auto industry in Michigan. Barack Obama made off the cuff remarks, chiding the hillbillies for clinging to religion and their guns. Those comments and attitude reflect the stark differences between what Hillbillies call big shots and themselves. Migrant hillbillies with their Mayberry style politics have periodically shocked our political sensibilities. Looking back on the voting groups over the years, they have been at the epicenter of political conflict. They have been square in the middle of hot-button issues like school busing, flag burning, the Vietnam War, remember, the America Love It or Leave It, or Leave It Bunch? Gun control, fair housing, and even no smoking laws, just to name a few. Their political behavior in Michigan has arguably been a significant factor in the weakening of the Democratic Party. Arguably, the biggest hillbilly political surprise of all was the presidential election in 2016. White working class and southern migrants were a major factor in the upset victory of President Donald Trump, whose 78,000 vote margin in just three states, three critical states, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, made him president and the most powerful cunt of the most powerful country on earth. Obviously, American political parties and others are desperate to understand emerging American nationalism. It will take no more than a couple of election cycles to figure it all out. The better method is to study history. Low-skilled and lowly educated hillbillies in places like Flint, Macomb County, Peoria, Fort Wayne, Lyme, Ohio, and Franklin, Ohio are the rocket fuel propelling the politics of our time. The latest politically disruptive awakening of the hillbillies has arisen largely as a result and then a reaction to globalization. Many hillbillies are deeply religious evangelical Christians. They feel deeply aggrieved by what they view as affronts to their hillbilly blue-collar cultural mores and religious beliefs. Hillbillies often see American life through the lens of class conflict. That is, they view elites fashioning in America for themselves to their exclusion. They get it that the highly educated, highly skilled, they're the winners of the global economic race. The sense I have is they feel totally shut out of a path to share in the tattered American dream. The stories of white southern migrants who settled in the rust bucket ghettos of the American Midwest help us understand their cultural moorings. A good part of my life I felt like stigmatized by my own community. The reason for this is I belonged to both the hillbilly world and those they called big shots. That was until one day, at the ripe old age of 37, I upset a long, a longtime incumbent prosecutor in an electoral landslide. My life story drastically changed and in a hurry. In fact, my whole life changed forever that day. Not all Midwest Southern migrants end up neatly fitting the cultural stereotype of white trash hillbillies. Some folks who drove through my childhood neighborhood in Flint might have referred to my family as hillbillies. No, I wasn't born and raised in a southern town. My name is Arthur not Jethro, Jimmy, or Billy. My hillbilly pedigree is different than the one played in the television show Beverly Hillbillies. The folklore goes like this. Real hillbillies aren't supposed to call a concrete jungle home. On television, the stereotype of white trash people is that they're uneducated, uncouth, wearing wife beater t-shirts, tattooed characters, landless with a southern draw. I'm not any of that either. White trash folks aren't supposed to grow up to be prosecutors in chaotic, violent, factory towns, nor are real Hillbilly supposed to find their first tadpole and polywogs in a polluted industrial waste pond in the heart of Flint, Michigan. The stereotypical Clodhopper doesn't have three college diplomas as I do. White Trash is supposed to drive a pickup truck with his dog hanging out the passenger side window listening to country music. She'd done me wrong songs. Well, I will confess and admit to all that. All that was learned in the shadows of the General Motors Auto Factory where I grew up was because of my reservoir of knowledge, and I took that as I became a leader in my community. The lessons learned and the values matured in the working-class neighborhood Dixieland were essential to not just survive, but to excel on the battlefield of America's war on crime. Not every change I experienced while becoming successful in local politics was all for the best. I still carry many psychological stars and frightening memories of being the top cop. I left that job after nearly a decade and a half with a good case of post-trauma stress disorder. Crime in Flint isn't beanbag. So how the hell did I end up here? I never was supposed to be what I became in America, or Flint that mattered. For that matter. For many hillbillies, it's hard to comprehend that Bubba lost his GM job in the revolving door of Flint layoffs. Bubba now sends his kids to schools that suck. Bubba is sick of not being able to identify any longer with an America that drinks wine and eats breed cheese voting for black and gay dudes for president of the United States. If you ask the Bubba's in Dixieland Subdivision if they are patriotic Americans, they will all show you the tattoo they got stamped in Vietnam. The tattoo is proudly located on their buff biceps just below their wife beater t-shirt. The tattoo is adorned with a scary-looking snake and the Revolutionary War slogan, Don't Tread on Me. How can you not love that? The simple answer is Bubba may be a little mixed up, but the more educated answer is they love America, but have grown to hate its government, the cops, some of its people, especially black and brown people. In their mind, they are patriots and stand out for true American values, which encompass faith, family, and the right to have a gun and be free. That means to be free to drink a case of beer with other Bubas on Saturday night and burn the rubber off their truck tires racing down Dixie Highway when the bars close. It's my observation, based on years of criminal investigations and prosecutorial experience, some hillbillies turn to white nationalists or wannabes. However, as a group, the Southern migrants have shown in research studies not to be found to be an activist group in any number. In my neck of the woods, hillbillies do find soulmates in militia groups, white nationalists, motorcycle gangs, unless we forget the low-key KKK. It's hard not to understand the attraction an automigrant hillbilly would have to such groups. The brutal ups and downs of the Flint auto manufacturing economy provides ammunition to blame and commiserate with extreme nationalist groups and gangs. The ruthless economic environment in Flint has treated these men and women as if they are interchangeable parts in the global economy. It drives them crazy to think that a brown-skinned person in Mexico is getting the job they should have should have kept for life.