Monica Potts on Inequality in Rural America

Your Fellows project is the forthcoming book, The Forgotten Girls, in which you return to your hometown of Clinton, Arkansas and explore the lives of poor rural women, including your childhood best friend. Can you share the genesis of the project?

In some ways I started working on this book almost a decade ago, when I first reported on a drop in the life expectancies of the least educated white women, and, to a lesser extent, men. Any group that moves backward in life expectancy is experiencing something bad, and I thought this was due in part to increasing inequality. Not just income inequality, but inequality of opportunity. All of that is partly tied into geography, and I thought geographic inequality was an unexplored dimension of class in America. This is something that I felt I really knew intuitively because I’d come from a very rural part of Arkansas, raised by working-class parents—my dad was a plumber who died at 55 and my mom quit work when she had my youngest sister, and then picked up odd jobs throughout her life until she started working full-time again when my dad got sick—and then went to an elite college and lived kind of on the sidelines of a very elite world as an adult. Throughout my adulthood I could see the big and small ways that where we’re from shape our lives, and the inequalities that are kind of baked in early on, and as a journalist I’d been most interested in exploring those geographic and systemic inequalities.

You are currently the Senior Politics Reporter at FiveThirtyEight. What draws you to a story? How do you hope shifting focus in political reporting towards rural America will shape the national political discourse?

I’m a patient storyteller. Early on, I booked tickets to Dallas several times and simply sat in the waiting room of a clinic, introducing myself to the men there. I’d explain that I was a journalist—previously at The New Yorker and The Atlantic—and that this wasn’t a commercial for them or the clinic, but that I had a genuine interest in breaking the taboos around the male body and male mental health. These men understood the pitch immediately. Many had been suffering in silence for years, and the ones who were ready to break that silence became the film’s main characters.

Earlier this year, you wrote about the anti-science attitude in rural America and growing sentiments of anti-intellectualism, which have now become a partisan issue. How do you see your book fitting into the national conversation around the rural-urban divide?

I hope that one of the things that people take from my book is a sense of the complexity of social life in rural America. I wrote about one person who struggled throughout her life, but part of the reason she struggled is that there is a culture of power here that works to enforce conformity and exclude people who don’t fit into what they think is an acceptable way of life. I think people have a romantic notion of what it means to live in rural America, but the truth is that it’s filled with people: some of them are mean, some of them are judgmental, some of them make mistakes they can’t recover from. Where I’m from there’s a constant, relentless pressure to worship as a Christian in the way people here define what that means. There isn’t a very vibrant civic life and so people’s week’s revolve around church, and that can become very atomized and isolating. The people who run the show in my hometown are extremely resistant to change. I hope my efforts to illustrate that complexity are useful to people who might be unfamiliar with it, and can shape how we approach things going forward.

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