Throwing off the yokel

By The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

LITTLE ROCK — No matter how much we love our state, we’ve got to admit: Arkansas’ image could use a makeover.

A long-standing, colorful and intermittently accurate image as a raucous backwater populated by hillbillies, rednecks, ignoramuses, family feuders, no-accounts and yard dogs is the reason we often find ourselves defending the delights of our homeland against the derision of others.

Where did this image come from? And what can we do about it?

These questions and others are considered in Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, & Good Ol’ Boys Defined a State (University of Arkansas Press, 250 pages, $29.95) by Brooks Blevins, the Noel Boyd associate professor of Ozark studies at Missouri State University in Springfield, Mo.

“This is not a book about the state of Arkansas so much as it is about the idea of Arkansas,” he says in the book’s acknowledgments.

The author, a native of Izard County, seeks to explain how the portrayal of Arkansas as a land of illiteracy, slow trains, bare feet, moonshine and double-wides began and has continued over some 200 years.

Blevins suggests Arkansas has undergone more caricaturing and stereotyping in the American imagination than any other state. And Arkansans’ defensive reactions don’t help matters.

It’s not like this is a surprise to anyone, but nobody talks much about it.

Read tomorrow's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for full details.

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