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Santa fe klan3/9/2023 ![]() But others, like the Collins brothers, who had been shrimping Texas bays since they were teenagers, wound up broken, in poor health, and facing premature deaths. Some, like Louis Beam, the former Klan leader who exploited the tension between the shrimpers and the refugees, remained unrepentant, at least publicly. In an extended epilogue, Johnson provides a where-are-they-now for his central characters. Oil continues to periodically spill into the bays and other waterways. In Seadrift and Seabrook, the tiny communities at the center of Johnson’s book, the shrimping business has dramatically shrunk. What little remains of the Gulf Coast shrimping industry is dominated by Vietnamese, who, as Johnson repeatedly tells us, always worked harder and smarter than their white counterparts. Today, 90 percent of the shrimp Americans eat is imported from aquafarms in Asia, which have their own substantial environmental costs. ![]() It was the same crazy talk we hear today from white nationalists emboldened by Trump and his ilk. ![]() The white fishers and their allies began insisting that the federal government was subsidizing the refugees in a plot to “replace” them. But instead of lashing out at the polluters, they trained their anger on the Vietnamese refugees who were suddenly competing for a diminishing catch.īefore long, a refugee killed a white shrimper in self defense, the resurgent Ku Klux Klan got involved, Vietnamese boats were torched, crosses were burned and guns brandished. As they sensed it all slipping away, they were angry and scared. At the same time, the fishers loved their communities, and took pride in their life on the water, the legacy of independence that had been passed down across generations. Family members worked at those plants, and the public narrative around them was one of progress. Much like the characters in Hochschild’s book, though, the white shrimpers in Texas refused to blame the oil industry for their declining catches. An exposé in Texas Monthly found leukemia rates in many of these coastal towns were quadruple the state average, and the magazine gave the affected areas a new name: the Cancer Belt. Mutant fish, shrimp and crabs began turning up in the fishermen’s nets. came from plants along Galveston Bay, where 30 percent of the country’s petroleum industry was based. By 1980, half the chemicals produced in the U.S. For decades, the oil and petrochemical industries had steadily colonized the Texas coastline, bringing thousands of jobs but also fouling the fertile waters with spilled oil and all manner of toxic chemicals, from benzene to mercury. military operation in their home country. I couldn’t help thinking of these two books while reading The Fishermen and the Dragon, Kirk Wallace Johnson’s brisk account of the protracted clash, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, between white shrimpers along the Gulf Coast of Texas and the influx of Vietnamese refugees displaced by the U.S. Her explanation for why they consistently seem to vote against their economic and environmental interests is more nuanced than Vance’s, teasing out what she calls her subjects’ “‘deep story,’ a narrative as felt.” She describes their abiding fear of cultural displacement and economic decline, their anger at “coastal liberals” who they think look down on them, and their “perceived betrayal” by the government for not protecting them from the petrochemical companies that are despoiling their “sportsman’s paradise.” Hochschild, meanwhile, a Berkeley-based sociologist, spent five years listening to pipefitters, plant operators, auto mechanics, school custodians and other blue-collar workers in the Louisiana bayou. Indeed, the Trumpian path Vance has traveled since his book brought him fame is no coincidence. We feel your pain, sort of, but you’re still to blame for your plight. Vance’s narrative is set among the various calamities that befell communities like the one where he grew up - the post-industrial economy, the opioid epidemic - but the diagnosis at the heart of Hillbilly Elegy is a familiar piety of the right: personal responsibility. Vance’s memoir of his hardscrabble childhood in Appalachia, explained Donald Trump’s victory - The New York Times called it a “civilized reference guide for an uncivilized election.” At the time, I was reading another book that also sought to divine the mindset, and voting decisions, of America’s white working class: Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land. In 2017, the media were abuzz about how Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Grand Dragon of the KKK Louis Beam sets fire to a boat during a rally against Vietnamese shrimpers in Santa Fe, Texas, in 1981. ![]() Back Forty will bring you periodic reviews, interviews and reporter insights about the stories they wrote.
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