Worked to the Bone: Race, Class, Power, and Privilege in Kentucky

Rating:
Summary: Worked to the Bone
Review: History is written by the "winners," the people possessing the money, the power, the control, and the victory over the subservient, weaker, poorer, "losing" groups. These "histories" tell the story of what it was like for the powerful "winners", often failing to describe the experience of the poor. History, however, has been re-written with the arrival of Pem Buck's Worked to the Bone: Race, Class, Power, & Privilege in Kentucky. Worked to the Bone tells the history of America, specifically Kentucky, from a distinctively different point of view in which members of the white, affluent, founding elite are not the heros. Rather, they are the white privileged class that manipulated constructions of race, gender, and other social structures so as to enhance and maintain their ideas of white/social privilege.
Pem Buck vocalizes her beliefs in the work's opening chapter that "the future is shaped by our view of the past" and "history is a story constructed to explain the present." Her aim is to present the history of the people that have been, in her words, "worked to the bone." The elite has worked the "bony-fingered people" since their arrival hundreds of years ago. Her view depicts the "view from under the sink," the view held by the people at the bottom of the social, racial, and economic ladders. Buck's work is successful in that it traces the evolution of societal constructions in Kentucky. However, Worked to the Bone is lacking in its ethnographic edge, failing to involve sufficient personal accounts, as well as its validity.
Ethnographic research, such as that presented in Buck's work, has its difficulties. With ethnographic research and writing one needs to respect the privacy of those with whom they work. Anonymity is a big issue, and if individuals request to remain anonymous, the researcher must comply. Such requests are those with which Buck must deal. This has an impact on her work that is impossible to ignore: places, names, and dates are changed so as to maintain anonymity. Buck's first endnote addresses this issue: "...most requested anonymity; thus all names of local people are pseudonyms...I have given pseudonyms to counties and towns and correspondingly changed names of newspapers and of local histories when they reveal county or town identity..." She also notes that certain locations have been "misplaced" and that census numbers have been altered so as to maintain confidentiality.
Although Buck claims that these alterations in no way alter her argument, the reader cannot help but find him/herself wondering about how much is "true" or not. Is it even possible to use this book as a valid source for one's own academic writing? This is a question that both the reader and writer must address, especially when it comes to citing Buck's research, research that may not be completely true due to respect of privacy issues.
Such are the troubles of ethnography, and the reader may also encounter what s/he may find disappointing: a lack of personal story. While Buck claims that her story is about the people "worked to the bone," the reader finds very few, if any, actual stories about the people of the "North" and "South" counties. Instead the reader finds stories (histories) about people of the area in general: histories free of significant detail, free of sufficient information. Her writing teases the reader: hinting at what went on in Kentucky to certain people without ever going any further.
Despite a deficit in these categories, Buck's writing is rich in historical details and flavor. The history of Kentucky is traced from the early days of European settlement well into the modern day issues and struggles regarding race, gender and religion. Worked to the Bone examines the power structures put into play throughout history and examines the way racial, gender, and social categories were assigned and upheld by the people possessing all the power. Buck makes a point out of the psychological wage of whiteness and the way in which this "wage" is modified to fit into the area's current frame of mind.
The psychological wage of whiteness is one of the much-appreciated consistencies of Buck's work. There are a few metaphors to which Buck repeatedly returns to further her point. Among the most prevalent, in addition to that of the psychological wage, are the "drainage system" and the "bony-fingered" metaphors. Both of the aforementioned relate to the position of the working class people. The "bony-fingered" people are, as mentioned earlier, those of the working, blue-collar class, who are found at the bottom of the "drainage system." This system, an extension of Buck's "view from under the sink" perspective, illustrated in her introduction, is used to show the way in which everything trickles down so as to only benefit the elite, leaving those at the bottom with little more than their bony fingers. These metaphors are referred to regularly throughout the work, a consistency that is helpful for the reader, as the reader is drawn back to Buck's central point repeatedly. This functions to further emphasize and strengthen her Marxist point of view regarding the elitist and working classes.
Just as it is difficult to ignore the persistent Marxist theory in her words, it is also short of impossible to ignore the constant presence of Buck's voice. This may be either helpful or harmful depending on the reader. In a sense, this personal tone adds to the anthropological nature of ethnographic research as the reader senses Buck's passion about a subject to which much time has been dedicated. At the same time, however, one could easily be distracted by this "personal touch," feeling either pulled along from one section to the next or thrown off by the frequently simplistic vocabulary and punchy sentence structure.
What Buck has accomplished is a historically anthropological examination of social structures and structures of production created by and for the elitist class against the poor, lower classes of Kentucky throughout history. She discusses, at length, the ways in which the white male elite strove to maintain the upper hand in terms of race, gender, class, and overall social power. While successfully doing all of this, the weaker aspects of her work tend to carry more weight, distract the reader, and therefore take away from the overall message of her text. Had this work directly discussed the people, had the lower class been given a face, perhaps the reader could have gotten a vivid and long lasting impression of what it was like to truly be worked to the bone.

Rating:
Summary: Worked to the Bone
Review: History is written by the "winners," the people possessing the money, the power, the control, and the victory over the subservient, weaker, poorer, "losing" groups. These "histories" tell the story of what it was like for the powerful "winners", often failing to describe the experience of the poor. History, however, has been re-written with the arrival of Pem Buck's Worked to the Bone: Race, Class, Power, & Privilege in Kentucky. Worked to the Bone tells the history of America, specifically Kentucky, from a distinctively different point of view in which members of the white, affluent, founding elite are not the heros. Rather, they are the white privileged class that manipulated constructions of race, gender, and other social structures so as to enhance and maintain their ideas of white/social privilege.
Pem Buck vocalizes her beliefs in the work's opening chapter that "the future is shaped by our view of the past" and "history is a story constructed to explain the present." Her aim is to present the history of the people that have been, in her words, "worked to the bone." The elite has worked the "bony-fingered people" since their arrival hundreds of years ago. Her view depicts the "view from under the sink," the view held by the people at the bottom of the social, racial, and economic ladders. Buck's work is successful in that it traces the evolution of societal constructions in Kentucky. However, Worked to the Bone is lacking in its ethnographic edge, failing to involve sufficient personal accounts, as well as its validity.
Ethnographic research, such as that presented in Buck's work, has its difficulties. With ethnographic research and writing one needs to respect the privacy of those with whom they work. Anonymity is a big issue, and if individuals request to remain anonymous, the researcher must comply. Such requests are those with which Buck must deal. This has an impact on her work that is impossible to ignore: places, names, and dates are changed so as to maintain anonymity. Buck's first endnote addresses this issue: "...most requested anonymity; thus all names of local people are pseudonyms...I have given pseudonyms to counties and towns and correspondingly changed names of newspapers and of local histories when they reveal county or town identity..." She also notes that certain locations have been "misplaced" and that census numbers have been altered so as to maintain confidentiality.
Although Buck claims that these alterations in no way alter her argument, the reader cannot help but find him/herself wondering about how much is "true" or not. Is it even possible to use this book as a valid source for one's own academic writing? This is a question that both the reader and writer must address, especially when it comes to citing Buck's research, research that may not be completely true due to respect of privacy issues.
Such are the troubles of ethnography, and the reader may also encounter what s/he may find disappointing: a lack of personal story. While Buck claims that her story is about the people "worked to the bone," the reader finds very few, if any, actual stories about the people of the "North" and "South" counties. Instead the reader finds stories (histories) about people of the area in general: histories free of significant detail, free of sufficient information. Her writing teases the reader: hinting at what went on in Kentucky to certain people without ever going any further.
Despite a deficit in these categories, Buck's writing is rich in historical details and flavor. The history of Kentucky is traced from the early days of European settlement well into the modern day issues and struggles regarding race, gender and religion. Worked to the Bone examines the power structures put into play throughout history and examines the way racial, gender, and social categories were assigned and upheld by the people possessing all the power. Buck makes a point out of the psychological wage of whiteness and the way in which this "wage" is modified to fit into the area's current frame of mind.
The psychological wage of whiteness is one of the much-appreciated consistencies of Buck's work. There are a few metaphors to which Buck repeatedly returns to further her point. Among the most prevalent, in addition to that of the psychological wage, are the "drainage system" and the "bony-fingered" metaphors. Both of the aforementioned relate to the position of the working class people. The "bony-fingered" people are, as mentioned earlier, those of the working, blue-collar class, who are found at the bottom of the "drainage system." This system, an extension of Buck's "view from under the sink" perspective, illustrated in her introduction, is used to show the way in which everything trickles down so as to only benefit the elite, leaving those at the bottom with little more than their bony fingers. These metaphors are referred to regularly throughout the work, a consistency that is helpful for the reader, as the reader is drawn back to Buck's central point repeatedly. This functions to further emphasize and strengthen her Marxist point of view regarding the elitist and working classes.
Just as it is difficult to ignore the persistent Marxist theory in her words, it is also short of impossible to ignore the constant presence of Buck's voice. This may be either helpful or harmful depending on the reader. In a sense, this personal tone adds to the anthropological nature of ethnographic research as the reader senses Buck's passion about a subject to which much time has been dedicated. At the same time, however, one could easily be distracted by this "personal touch," feeling either pulled along from one section to the next or thrown off by the frequently simplistic vocabulary and punchy sentence structure.
What Buck has accomplished is a historically anthropological examination of social structures and structures of production created by and for the elitist class against the poor, lower classes of Kentucky throughout history. She discusses, at length, the ways in which the white male elite strove to maintain the upper hand in terms of race, gender, class, and overall social power. While successfully doing all of this, the weaker aspects of her work tend to carry more weight, distract the reader, and therefore take away from the overall message of her text. Had this work directly discussed the people, had the lower class been given a face, perhaps the reader could have gotten a vivid and long lasting impression of what it was like to truly be worked to the bone.

Rating:
Summary: Real History for Real People
Review: In Worked to the Bone: Race, Class, Power, & Privilege in Kentucky, Pem Davidson Buck offers an intimate view of social history "from under the sink," as she puts it. Her concern is with the lives of men and women whose labors typically go unnoticed and uncelebrated in popular history. Indeed, insofar as popular history books and history textbooks tend to assume the naturalness of elite privilege (such is the essence of the "great man" theory of history), Buck's study is very pointedly offered as an antidote to the orthodoxy. Her focus is on the power struggles between the wealthy and the exploited in Kentucky, and on how modern racial and class identities have been forged in the fire of that struggle. By extension, her work offers a keen analysis of the cultural formations that shape the identities of all Americans.

Elites weren't born to rule, and there certainly isn't any divine ordinance guaranteeing their continued dominance. Thus, as Buck's account of Kentucky history reveals, they could never afford to take their power for granted. Their strategy historically has been to divide and conquer. From the colonial period to the post-cold war period elites have pitted non-elites against each other--men against women, Europeans against Africans, northern Europeans against southern Europeans, the Irish against the English, "real Americans" against naturalized immigrants, middle class against lower class--in order to maintain their iron grip on power. They also have had to police the arbitrary borders of human identity that they helped to create. Buck's study especially excels at showing how the ideological construction of the "white race" has helped to promote elite privilege over the last three centuries.

Worked to the Bone is a fine book that seeks not only to instruct, but also to affect a real change in attitudes about class politics in the United States. Buck is clearly on a mission here, and her readily accessible prose style means that people both in and out of the academy will be able to read her, and clearly understand her message. She compels us to examine what the lives of typical working class people in Kentucky and elsewhere might be like if the elites were dethroned, and if our country's resources were distributed in a more humane and truly democratic fashion.

Rating:
Summary: Real History for Real People
Review: In Worked to the Bone: Race, Class, Power, & Privilege in Kentucky, Pem Davidson Buck offers an intimate view of social history "from under the sink," as she puts it. Her concern is with the lives of men and women whose labors typically go unnoticed and uncelebrated in popular history. Indeed, insofar as popular history books and history textbooks tend to assume the naturalness of elite privilege (such is the essence of the "great man" theory of history), Buck's study is very pointedly offered as an antidote to the orthodoxy. Her focus is on the power struggles between the wealthy and the exploited in Kentucky, and on how modern racial and class identities have been forged in the fire of that struggle. By extension, her work offers a keen analysis of the cultural formations that shape the identities of all Americans.

Elites weren't born to rule, and there certainly isn't any divine ordinance guaranteeing their continued dominance. Thus, as Buck's account of Kentucky history reveals, they could never afford to take their power for granted. Their strategy historically has been to divide and conquer. From the colonial period to the post-cold war period elites have pitted non-elites against each other--men against women, Europeans against Africans, northern Europeans against southern Europeans, the Irish against the English, "real Americans" against naturalized immigrants, middle class against lower class--in order to maintain their iron grip on power. They also have had to police the arbitrary borders of human identity that they helped to create. Buck's study especially excels at showing how the ideological construction of the "white race" has helped to promote elite privilege over the last three centuries.

Worked to the Bone is a fine book that seeks not only to instruct, but also to affect a real change in attitudes about class politics in the United States. Buck is clearly on a mission here, and her readily accessible prose style means that people both in and out of the academy will be able to read her, and clearly understand her message. She compels us to examine what the lives of typical working class people in Kentucky and elsewhere might be like if the elites were dethroned, and if our country's resources were distributed in a more humane and truly democratic fashion.