Conservative political magazine calls America's poorest county the heart of the Big White Ghetto

Eastern Kentucky's Owsley County is routinely at the top, or near the top, of every list of America's poorest counties. While other news sources have delved into the hows and whys that have led the county and its Central Appalachian neighbors to the bottom of the Amerfican economic order, conservative journalist Kevin D. Williamson has written a story for the National Review Online that goes further, calling Owsley the heart of "America's White Ghetto." (NR photo)

Kevin D. Williamson

Williamson writes: "There are lots of diversions in the Big White Ghetto, the vast moribund matrix of Wonder Bread-hued Appalachian towns and villages stretching from northern Mississippi to southern New York, a slowly dissipating nebula of poverty and misery with its heart in Eastern Kentucky, the last redoubt of the Scots-Irish working class that picked up where African slave labor left off, mining and cropping and sawing the raw materials for a modern American economy that would soon run out of profitable uses for the class of people who 500 years ago would have been known, without any derogation, as peasants.

"Thinking about the future here and its bleak prospects is not much fun at all, so instead of too much black-minded introspection you have the pills and the dope, the morning beers, the endless scratch-off lotto cards, healing meetings up on the hill, the federally funded ritual of trading cases of food-stamp Pepsi for packs of Kentucky’s Best cigarettes and good old hard currency, tall piles of gas-station nachos, the occasional blast of meth, Narcotics Anonymous meetings, petty crime, the draw, the recreational making and surgical unmaking of teenaged mothers, and death: Life expectancies are short — the typical man here dies well over a decade earlier than does a man in Fairfax County, Va. — and they are getting shorter, women’s life expectancy having declined by nearly 1.1 percent from 1987 to 2007. If the people here weren’t 98.5 percent white, we’d call it a reservation."

Here's one more excerpt: "Those who have the required work skills, the academic ability, or the simple, desperate, native, enterprising grit to do so, get the hell out as fast as they can, and they have been doing that for decades. As they go, businesses disappear, institutions fall into decline, social networks erode, and there is little or nothing left over for those who remain. It’s a classic economic death spiral: The quality of the available jobs is not enough to keep good workers, and the quality of the available workers is not enough to attract good jobs." (Read more)

UPDATE, Jan. 12: In his column in The New York Times, economist Paul Krugman responds to Williamson, disputing his thesis, as Krugman describes it, that "government aid creates dependency."
Jan. 13: Tim Marema, editor of the Daily Yonder, writes, "We’re not sure what the purpose of Williamson’s article is, other than to impugn an entire region. But Williamson’s portrait omits a lot, including the fact that he’s opened his double-barrelled disparagement on one of the most reliably Republican counties in the United States."