Duck Dynasty Patriarch as Pap Finn

Ron Perlman as Pap Finn

Pap (Ron Perlman) in “Huckleberry Finn”

The culture wars never die but just ebb and flow. The latest outbreak occurred last week when patriarch Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty fame made homophobic and racist remarks in an interview with Gentleman’s Quarterly (GQ). Advertisers expressed discomfort, A&E suspended him, the rightwing social media exploded, the usual crowd of politicians inveighed against hypocritical liberals and the first amendment (Palin, Cruz, et. al.), and here we are where we’ve been countless times before.

Whatever you think of Duck Dynasty, there are important insights into race and class tensions that the whole episode reveals. The fact that this same dynamic is at work in Huckleberry Finn (1884) shows how deep an American problem it is.

While much of the attention has been directed towards Robertson’s homophobic slurs, I’m going to focus on the racism. Here’s one particularly obnoxious remark:

I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field. …They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’ — not a word! …Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.

When I read this, I recalled the scene in D. W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece Birth of a Nation (1915) where the slaves are singing happily as they pick cotton while the master and his guests stroll by. One of these slaves is then summoned and dances a happy jig to the applauding whites.

A couple of African American columnists have unloaded on Robertson. First, here’s Charles Blow of the New York Times, who grew up black and poor in Louisiana:

While [Robertson’s claim] is possible, it is highly improbable. Robertson is 67 years old, born into the Jim Crow South. Only a man blind and naïve to the suffering of others could have existed there and not recognized that there was a rampant culture of violence against blacks, with incidents and signs large and small, at every turn, on full display. Whether he personally saw interpersonal mistreatment of them is irrelevant.

Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic, meanwhile, points to the bloody history of southern lynchings to provide the background that gets omitted from Robertson’s account:

The black people who Phil Robertson knew were warred upon. If they valued their lives, and the lives of their families, the last thing they would have done was voiced a complaint about “white people” to a man like Robertson. Ignorance is no great sin and one can forgive the good-natured white person for not knowing how all that cannibal sausage was truly made. But having been presented with a set of facts, Robertson’s response is to cite “welfare” and “entitlement” as the true culprits.

Something else stands out to me about Robertson’s remarks, however, and that’s how he refers to himself as “white trash” and talks about hoeing alongside blacks. There’s more than black-white distinction at play here. There’s also poor white-rich white. This is where Huck Finn becomes relevant.

I’ve written recently on this theme, of how Twain sees a natural alliance between blacks and lower class whites, which he memorably captures in the friendship between Huck and Jim. Huck’s sense of self respect, however, is based on seeing himself as fundamentally superior to Jim. Much of the humor of the book lies in the way that Huck will patronize Jim even as he reveals his own poor white ignorance. At the end of one argument that he loses, Huck concludes, “I see it warn’t no use wasting words—you can’t learn a nigger to argue. So I quit.”

Does Robertson really think that people like him—okay, those who are not television stars–don’t take advantage of social security and Medicaid and food stamps and unemployment insurance? Does he not understand that the Mitt Romneys and Paul Ryans of the world see hillbillies like him as part of the 47%, as takers rather than the makers? Isn’t he, in his interview (with GQ of all publications!), telling the world that, although he may be white trash, at least he’s not one of those welfare entitlement blacks.

In Huckleberry Finn, the rich whites have nothing but contempt for the poor whites, and it is this contempt that the poor whites revisit upon the blacks. Pap Finn, who disgusts Judge Thatcher and the rest of upper-crust Hannibal society, is exhibit A for this projection. His hatred for the government and upper-class Hannibal and his sense of victimization sounds a lot like today’s Tea Party rhetoric:

Call this a govment! why, just look at it and see what it’s like. Here’s the law a-standing ready to take a man’s son away from him—a man’s own son, which he has had all the trouble and all the anxiety and all the expense of raising.  Yes, just as that man has got that son raised at last, and ready to go to work and begin to do suthin’ for him and give him a rest, the law up and goes for him.  And they call that govment!  That ain’t all, nuther.  The law backs that old Judge Thatcher up and helps him to keep me out o’ my property.  Here’s what the law does:  The law takes a man worth six thousand dollars and up’ards, and jams him into an old trap of a cabin like this, and lets him go round in clothes that ain’t fitten for a hog. They call that govment!  A man can’t get his rights in a govment like this. Sometimes I’ve a mighty notion to just leave the country for good and all. Yes, and I told ’em so; I told old Thatcher so to his face.  Lots of ’em heard me, and can tell what I said.  Says I, for two cents I’d leave the blamed country and never come a-near it agin.  Them’s the very words.  I says look at my hat—if you call it a hat—but the lid raises up and the rest of it goes down till it’s below my chin, and then it ain’t rightly a hat at all, but more like my head was shoved up through a jint o’ stove-pipe.  Look at it, says I—such a hat for me to wear—one of the wealthiest men in this town if I could git my rights.

And then look at where he ends up targeting his wrath:

Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful.  Why, looky here. There was a free nigger there from Ohio—a mulatter, most as white as a white man.  He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane—the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the State.  And what do you think?  They said he was a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything.  And that ain’t the wust. They said he could vote when he was at home.  Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to?  It was ‘lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn’t too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they’d let that nigger vote, I drawed out.  I says I’ll never vote agin.  Them’s the very words I said; they all heard me; and the country may rot for all me—I’ll never vote agin as long as I live.

Any doubt about what Pap would think of our current “mulatter” president?

One scene where we see vividly the contempt that rich whites have for poor whites occurs when Colonel Sherburn shoots a drunkard who is railing at him and then faces down a lynch mob.  “Now the thing for you to do is to droop your tails and go home and crawl in a hole,” he tells them in a famous scene.  But there’s one twist to the episode that my student Alex McGough had to point out to me. Note how the blacks respond as the lynch mob picks up steam:

Children was heeling it ahead of the mob, screaming and trying to get out of the way; and every window along the road was full of women’s heads, and there was nigger boys in every tree, and bucks and wenches looking over every fence; and as soon as the mob would get nearly to them they would break and skaddle back out of reach.

As Alex noted, the African Americans are well aware that the anger the mob has for Sherburn could just as easily be directed against them. This has occurred frequently in American history.

So yes, Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson may well have hoed along side blacks when he was growing up, and if he was paid more than they were, it probably wasn’t appreciably more. There’s a natural alliance there. But he’d rather see himself as one with the editors of GQ. In fact, he’s both flattered by GQ’s attention and playing out the hillbilly stereotype for their amusement. He’s like the dancing slave in Birth of a Nation.

Actually, that’s not a bad description of Duck Dynasty as a whole. The faux populists, the Sarah Palins and Ted Cruzes, may offer Robertson their support, but their outrage is only another publicity getting, fund-raising stunt. They are not true friends.

If Robertson wants to rise above GQ contempt, he could take guidance from Huckleberry Finn. There he will find two humans, one black and one white, who open themselves to each other and sacrifice for each other, thereby discovering their deepest humanity.

Huck  thinks he’s going to hell for working to free Jim, and Jim thinks he’s giving up his hope for freedom by tending to the wounded Tom, but the two have just stepped into a space that is beyond the contempt of the rest of society. It’s those who remain trapped in their resentment and their easy superiority who are in hell.

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