Ignorant Hillbillies: The Representation Of Southern Culture By Television

Anne Shelby, an Appalachian author, visited a private school in Louisville. The teacher introduced her as follows, “This is Anne Shelby, our visiting author, and she lives in the middle of nowhere”. “No!” Anne protested. “I live in the middle of somewhere.” This experience may explain the problem of why southerners are seen as different. According to Dwight Billing southerners live in a real place that

However, television sitcoms have done very little to portray this kind of image for southern culture. The television sitcoms of the fifties, sixties, and seventies, in an effort to depict southerners as friendly characters to come back and watch week after week instead depicted them as comical idiots in a world that they didn’t understand. Harkins stated it well when he said that The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Hee Haw and other rural sitcoms, aired back to back on Tuesday evenings, was “the most effective effort ever exerted by a nation to belittle, demean, and otherwise destroy a minority people within its boundaries”(Harkins, 2002, p. 121).

The response to the hillbilly image by southerners has also been documented. Dwight Billings, in his book Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes, goes into the analysis of how the Appalachian people have responded to the representation of their culture by television (Billings, 1999). His book details the ways in which television has created the images of southern culture as well as the organizations formed to fight this stereotyping (119-227). Allison Graham’s book Framing the South: Hollywood, Television, and Race During the Civil Rights Struggle, is an analysis of the history in which Hollywood began its “caricature of the South” as she puts it (Graham, 2001). She discusses many popular Southern faces during the Civil Rights movement and how it became necessary to portray not only the amusing ignorance of backwood hillbillies and noble farmers, but also the despised rural poor and white racists of every class (2001).

In conclusion, ignorant hillbillies can be an accurate representation of southern people. Most southerners do not know why people continue to judge them based on inaccurate images produced by television. Southerners in general live a life that is one of honor and goodness, which in a world of terrorism, war, and political corrected ness is a value that more people should use in everyday life experiences.

Cultivation theory states “that heavy exposure to …[television], creates …attitudes more consistent with a media conjured version of reality than with what actual reality is” (Greunke, 2000). Television has created the image that hillbillies are uneducated, poor, uncivilized, immoral, and ignorant of mainstream culture. People use this television created image to judge the culture and people of southern America in a very negative light.

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