MANIFESTATIONS: The way of life in Dirt Town Valley!

TUESDAY, JULY 6, 2021

But also at ESPN: According to her LinkedIn page, Kim Severson is National Food Correspondent at the New York Times.

Her official New York Times bio offers more detailed fare:

Kim Severson is a Southern-based correspondent who covers the nation's food culture. She reports on food news, contributes to NYT Cooking and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues.

Ms. Severson has been on staff since 2004, and served as The Times’s Southern bureau chief, where she covered a mix of breaking and political news.

Before she joined The Times, Kim spent six years writing about food and culture for The San Francisco Chronicle...

Severson's 2010 memoir was called Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life. It was the third of her four books. The publisher, Penguin Random House, describes it thusly:

Somewhere between the lessons her mother taught her and the ones she is now trying to teach her own daughter, Kim Severson stumbled. She lost sight of what mattered, of who she was and who she wanted to be, and of how she needed to live her life. It took a series of encounters with female cooks—including Marion Cunningham, Alice Waters, Ruth Reichl, Rachael Ray, and Marcella Hazan—to reteach her the life lessons she had forgotten, and many she had never learned in the first place...

There was a time, not long ago, when Our Town was sustained by such uplifting fare. That is no longer the case

By any measure, Severson has had a long and impressive high-end career. On Monday morning, she appeared on the front page of the New York Times with a lengthy profile, one which captures the state of upper-end press culture in Our Town in these modern times. 

As published, Severson's dateline was "DIRT TOWN VALLEY, Ga." That's a very colorful name, but, for better or worse, Dirt Town Valley isn't exactly a place in the normal journalistic sense.

There is no city or town in Georgia bearing that colorful name. We'll guess the name was simply too colorful—too close to Dogpatch or God's Little Acre—to be passed by in a front-page travelogue of this type.

More precisely, Dirt Town Valley isn't a "community of 26,000"—and that's the way Severson describes the place where the subject of her profile lives. Instead, Severson seems to be referring to Chattooga County, Ga.—population, 26,015 in the 2010 census—where Stacie Marshall  lives with her husband and their three daughters, residents of the small unincorporated community of Gore.

Why do we say that Marshall lives in Gore? That's the location she cites on the glossy web site she maintains for the 300-acre family farm she will fully inherit when her father dies. 

(On the website, she has named the place Mountain Mama Farms, possibly after herself.)

On yesterday morning's front page, Severson offered a detailed account of Marshall's current attempted role in her broader community. In an early nugget, we're offered this overview:

SEVERSON (7/5/21): For almost three years now, with the fervor of the newly converted, Ms. Marshall has been on a quest that from the outside may seem quixotic and even naïve. She is diving into her family’s past and trying to chip away at racism in the Deep South, where every white family with roots here benefited from slavery and almost every Black family had enslaved ancestors.

“I don’t have a lot of money, but I have property,” she said during a walk on her farm last winter. “How am I going to use that for the greater good, and not in like a paying-penance sort of way but in an it’s-just-the-right-thing-to-do kind of way?”

It’s not easy finding anyone in this farming community of 26,000 she can talk to about white privilege, critical race theory or renewed calls for federal reparations. She can’t even get her cousins to stop flying the Confederate flag. It’s about heritage, not hate, they tell her.

According to Severson, some might find Marshall's quest quixotic, even naïve. You see, Marshall is "trying to chip away at racism in the Deep South."

Racial cluelessness inside the New York Times will have to wait for someone else to come along. Marshall is trying to "chip away at racism in the Deep South"—in places with exotic names like Dirt Town Valley!

As a matter of basic theory, that sounds like a good thing to do. That said, it isn't an easy task, as Marshall is said to be learning.

According to Severson, it isn't easy finding people in Chattooga County who want to talk about white privilege, critical race theory or even about renewed calls for federal reparations. Part of the reason may be found in this passage:

SEVERSON: The rolling farmland in this northwest corner of Georgia has never lent itself to the plantation agriculture that once dominated other parts of the South. Today, about 300 small farms raise cattle and broiler chickens, and grow soybeans and hay.

Few make much money. The poverty rate has edged close to double the nation’s. Ms. Marshall, who is on the board of the local homeless shelter, sees people in need all around her. “It’s really hard for people in Chattooga County to understand white privilege because they’re like, ‘We’re barely getting by,’” she said.

Over the years, her father and grandfather drove trucks or took shifts at the cotton mill to keep the farm running. At 68, her father, Steve Scoggins, still works 3 p.m. to midnight as a hospital maintenance man.

Few farms make much money in Chattooga County. Marshall's father, who is 68, still maintains a full-time job. The poverty rate in the county is high.

(Severson never explains the current job status of Marshall or her husband. At one point, she places their ten years of employment at Berry College in the past tense.)

Chattooga County isn't a high-income place. But for Marshall, it's hard to get people at the homeless shelter to appreciate the extent of their white privilege! Down at the local homeless shelter, they just don't seem to get it! Or so Severson maybe says.

Stacie Marshall may well be doing God's work, or at least trying to do so. That said, we found Severson's front-page profile a little bit hard to swallow. 

We're not sure we should have reacted that way, but we'll report that we did. In the next few days, we'll describe various parts of the profile in more detail.

We had a more clearcut reaction to another sprawling front-page report in yesterday's New York Times—this time, to a sprawling report on the front page of the paper's Sports Monday section.

Here too, the Times attempted to offer instruction concerning matters of race. The mammoth report concerns "the scandal" which ensued at ESPN when sportscaster Rachel Nichols was unknowingly recorded, more than a year ago, during a telephone conversation.

Nichols was recorded making remarks which we would have to score as massively less than scandalous. We'll also discuss this second front-page report as the week proceeds.

This second front-page report has apparently created a world of reaction and uproar. We've seen one journalistic reaction which is about as baldly disingenuous as journalistic reactions get.

(Explosive headline on the report: A Disparaging Video Prompts Explosive Fallout Within ESPN.)

We'll start to explore that report tomorrow, even as we continue to "walk that lonesome valley," the one with the colorful name and the fascinating personal interactions. 

(Marshall's father is a Trump voter. He supports his daughter's antiracism work. His lifelong best friend is black.)

In the larger sense, Our Town is in a world of hurt, as is our failing nation. It has often seemed to us that the fatuous nature of Our Town's most famous newspaper has played a key role in that unfolding mess, dating back into the early 1990s. 

That predisposition may help explain our reaction to Severson's front-page report.

According to experts, the Times has recently moved from complete indifference concerning matters of race to the massive and unending performance of moral greatness. The reports we've mentioned are part of the slough of "manifestations" to which these experts refer.

Is there something for subscribers to gain from yesterday's trip to Dirt Town Valley? Concerning the trip inside ESPN, we'd say the answer to a similar question would quite plainly be no.

That said, these manifestations never stop at this point in time.. Neither does the performative virtue, and perhaps the shaky judgment with the occasional bit of bad faith.

As Dylan was "tangled up in blue," Our Town is now tangled in "race." We hope we can move on to Einstein next week, but there aren't many Einsteins here.

Tomorrow: The female sportscaster's tale

Concerning Chattooga County: According to the leading authority on Chattooga County, its population was 26,015 as of the 2010 census. The county seat is Summerville (no relation).

The county contains four incorporated cities and twelve unincorporated communities.  Gore is one of those smaller communities. You can see them all listed here.


40 comments:

  1. "But for Marshall, it's hard to get people at the homeless shelter to appreciate the extent of their white privilege!"

    As always, thank you for documenting liberal-hitlerian atrocities, dear Bob. God bless your heart.

    ReplyDelete
  2. More proof Somerby hates blacks and women.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I think that is very fairly extrapolated by the post, his hatred of blacks, Mexicans and women whilst supporting Trump and Javiar Nunez.

      Delete
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  3. Steve Krakhauer made the point that Maria Taylor is currently in contract renegotiation with ESPN and the timing of the story was meant to influence that process.

    He makes the point that the timing of a story is as important as who, what, where…

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I would say that the truth of a story is much more important than its timing. Of course sources will have motives for leaking, for speaking to the press, for granting interviews. That criteria for publishing a story is not who benefits or how, but whether the information is true and whether the public has a need or a right to know.

      Cecelia seems to think that the timing somehow discredits the info in the story. I think these are separate considerations.

      Delete
    2. I was repeating the information given by Krakhauer because it’s interesting and the timing is worth noting that the controversy with Nichols and Taylor was in 2020 and story wasn’t exactly burning up the internet right now.

      Krakhauer makes an excellent point that people have a right to know and to consider the context in which a story appears. He’s right to say that this should be considered.

      As to what I personally think about the controversy, Nichols said nothing damning and shouldn’t have apologized.

      That this also revealed that Nichols has a cozy relationship with a LeBron’s rep, serves to make his point about scrutinizing all aspects of reporting by ESPN reporters and media in general.

      Delete
    3. Whatever the timing, you still must consider the facts in a report. If the facts were wrong, then the timing might provide clues to motive for writing a false report, but when the facts are accurate, the timing is irrelevant. Pointing to that timing then appears to be an attempt to discredit the report. And you further must consider the motives of the person pointing out that timing. Sports is a small world. It is hard to avoid interconnections and "cozy" relationships, and they cannot all be suspicious. I think you should be more cautious with this kind of thinking.

      Delete
    4. Krakhauer focus wasn’t what happened between Nichols and Taylor. That’s been reported.

      This was a piece in his newsletter that he writes about the media.

      As a reporter who is on that beat, he is suspicious when journalists have close relations with the people they cover or with the powerful people these sports figures hire to represent them.

      He’s suspicious when year old stories are suddenly done up in the NYT when it is most helpful to another journalist.

      That’s the essence of cautious.

      What you resent is that Krakhauer approached the story from a media beat angle that was not solely about the racial controversy.



      Delete
  4. About those poor people at the homeless shelter: They are victims as well.
    President Lyndon B. Johnson once said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I hear they eat German babies.

      Delete
    2. I hear they support the suppression of black votes.

      Delete
    3. Bastards can’t even jump.

      Delete
    4. Cecelia, your quips aren't appreciated here. Some of us find them offensive. Akleem is making a good point, one that I agree with.

      In a way, even Somerby is a victim of his own privilege. It seems to be doing bad things to his soul and ruining his karma.

      "But for Marshall, it's hard to get people at the homeless shelter to appreciate the extent of their white privilege! Down at the local homeless shelter, they just don't seem to get it! Or so Severson maybe says."

      Notice the word "maybe" in the last sentence. This is your cue to go look up what Severson actually said. It won't be what Somerby attributes to her. I doubt Marshall was down at the homeless shelter trying to get homeless people to "check" their privilege. And by going to the shelter to help out, she is being far from "performative" in her advocacy. As Akleem points out, it is wrong to scapegoat convenient out-groups for one's misfortunates, as Trump and other Republicans have encouraged hapless white followers to do. That is one function of racist thinking -- to protect the ego from personal failure. When that failure is not due to one's own efforts but instead is a feature of a capitalist economy, scapegoating is one way to keep workers from questioning the system and demanding change.

      Perhaps that is why Somerby is working so energetically here to get us all to change our focus from racism and instead attack journalists, especially those who are female and write about food. How hypocritical is it to worry about the success of white farmers while claiming that food reporting has no place at the NY Times. What does Somerby think those struggling white farmers grow?

      Delete
    5. No, it isn't Somerby's point.

      Delete
  5. We hope we can move on to Einstein next week? Come on! Einstein is so much more interesting than this crap.

    ReplyDelete
  6. "According to experts, the Times has recently moved from complete indifference concerning matters of race to the massive and unending performance of moral greatness."

    Why should there not be coverage of Marshall's efforts? Why shouldn't people engage in anti-racism to the best of their abilities? Somerby, like any reader, can skip the stories he lacks interest in (such as this one presumably) while others might like to read about Marshall's efforts, perhaps identifying with her or finding commonality with her experiences.

    The fact that Marshall's father has a black best friend perhaps explains Marshall's concern with eliminating racism in her community. It certainly doesn't show that there is no need to do so. I found myself wondering why Somerby mentioned it. It seems clear that Somerby lacks sympathy with both Marshall and the journalist who interviewed her. He perhaps thinks the NY Times needs more sports coverage?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I think he means that the NYT (and perhaps, Marshall) needs a sense of irony.

      Today’s blog is a hoot.

      Delete
    2. "Today's blog is a hoot."

      That tells us all we need to know about you. If you weren't an idiot, you wouldn't think that because there are poor white people, that means there is no such thing as white privilege. Somerby is being manipulative. You are just obtuse. I would feel for you, but I used up my empathy on those poor white farmers who are able to find good second jobs in a small rural community, which allows them to support themselves.

      Delete
    3. Did anyone actually argue that because white people can be poor that there is no such phenomenon as white privilege?

      No, no one did. You just did your usual hopping to hyperbolic conclusions because that is the most denigrating take on TDH.

      The approach you take in writing a story speaks things as does your approach with people in particular circumstances.

      I don’t know if Marshall has a tin ear, but Severson might have needed a better editor.

      Delete
    4. What then did you mean by "irony?"

      Delete
    5. I explained that in saying that approaches to stories that comment on people in particularly stressful situations require the same subtlety as approaching the individuals.

      It’s ironic that anyone would say that such considerations as to personal status matter when race is involved and be less so as to other life challenges.

      Delete
    6. And what is your evidence that either Severson or Marshall said such things? Somerby?

      Delete
    7. Eh….this:

      “Ms. Marshall, who is on the board of the local homeless shelter, sees people in need all around her. “It’s really hard for people in Chattooga County to understand white privilege because they’re like, ‘We’re barely getting by,’” she said.”

      That should win some sort of “duh…ya think?” award.

      Maybe let these people slide on the white privilege front?

      At least until they get their own place…

      Delete
    8. How else can Ms. Marshall become a privileged follower of the liberal cult?

      Becoming a globalist currency-speculating billionaire seems unlikely, so this is the only way...

      Delete
  7. That poor white people have difficulty understanding white privilege doesn't mean it is nonexistent. There are clearly other white people who are rich, well educated and holding important jobs, who were helped not only by their own efforts but by that social privilege. It is also unknowable whether those poor white people in Georgia might have had worse lives without whatever privilege they did experience. Clearly black people do not do as well, in general, as white people, even in poor rural areas of Georgia. Black people tend to be more disadvantaged in poverty than white poor people are. For one thing, those farmers working two jobs do have farms. When Biden tried to help poor black farmers struggling during covid, his efforts were blocked, but the reason why he was trying to do so was the disparity even among struggling rural farmers, between black and white people.

    Somerby cannot make this reality disappear by mocking a NY Times reporter who covers food issues. Somerby's contempt for Severson is obvious, but he never really says why she is a target of mockery. Is food not important to Somerby? It is to most other people, aside from being necessary to sustain life.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. 'Somerby's contempt for Severson is obvious, but he never really says why she is a target of mockery. Is food not important to Somerby?'

      Somerby mocks reporters when they don't cover 'serious' stuff. Serious stuff as defined by SOmerby is defending Donald Trump, Roy Moore, Ron Johnson, Devin Nunes and Matt Gaetz.

      Delete
  8. "More precisely, Dirt Town Valley isn't a "community of 26,000"—and that's the way Severson describes the place where the subject of her profile lives. Instead, Severson seems to be referring to Chattooga County, Ga.—population, 26,015 in the 2010 census—where Stacie Marshall lives with her husband and their three daughters, residents of the small unincorporated community of Gore."

    Somerby does a lot of speculating here and implies that Severson is concealing or misrepresenting where Marshall says she lives.

    As a resident of California, I lived in a small town called Yucaipa, in the larger San Bernardino country (one of the largest in the nation). However, the general area where I lived was also called the Inland Empire. That term is not a municipal designation or any kind of official government entity. It is a name for a general area of the sprawling Southern California area. Across Los Angeles, there are other similar designations, such as the San Gabriel and San Fernando Valleys. "The San Fernando Valley contains two incorporated cities, Burbank & San Fernando, and part of a third, Los Angeles, which governs a majority of the valley. The unincorporated communities (Census-designated places) are governed by the County of Los Angeles." Again, the Valley (referred to in Zappa's song Valley Girl) is a place but not a political incorporation. Similarly, people sometimes refer to The West Side, when talking about cities such as Santa Monica, West Hollywood and Venice.

    There need not be anything nefarious about Severson's use of the term Dirt Valley to refer to a farming area in Southern Georgia. That may simply be what people who live there call their own region. And they can live there despite also living in Gore or Chattooga County.

    Somerby is behaving like an asshole when he blows this up to imply bad reporting by Severson or lying by Marshall, two people he obviously dislikes by his tone and approach to discussing the content of that article.

    ReplyDelete
  9. "It’s not easy finding anyone in this farming community of 26,000 she can talk to about white privilege, critical race theory or renewed calls for federal reparations."

    Yeah but nothing's stopping her from talking about reparations at the next NYT corporate cocktail party with her bosses, the white-Hamptons-based owners of the NYT. I would suggest that these white owners of the NYT do their part and give the newspaper to Black people as reparations...maybe to the long suffering Oprah who struggles to buy $40K purses in Switzerland.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You are confusing Severson and Marshall. Marshall lives in the farming community and supposedly wants to talk about CRT. It is Severson who works for the newspaper.

      Are you aware that black people already have their own media. It is interesting to read what they say there about people like you.

      Yes, rich people do expect to be treated with a certain amount of privilege. Opening a shop after hours for her personal shopping pleasure is a perk most of us do not enjoy, regardless of our skin color. Oprah's tantrum reveals the way privilege can distort a sense of what is owed to us (our sense of entitlement). As a human being, not even Oprah is immune to the distortions of reality that occur with too much money. Your obsession with Oprah is noted.

      Delete
    2. From The Root, a black newsletter:

      "Nikole Hannah-Jones will not be joining the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—despite the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist finally being granted tenure at the school following a long, white tears-infused drama that should never have been entertained by the school’s board of trustees. Instead, Hannah-Jones and famed author Ta-Nehisi Coates will both be starting jobs at Howard University, a renowned HBCU and a school that didn’t force the creator of The 1619 Project into a Hannah-Jones-vs-white-fragility battle all because conservatives get all in their feelings over Blackness being centered in American history."

      Delete
    3. When Blacks inevitably win the race war, I'm hoping Orpah is anointed Empress for life with Queen Latifah as Vice-Empress.

      Delete
    4. I'm just thankful black people bailed out the USA, yet again, last year.

      Delete
    5. Gayle King would be a lock on V-E.

      Delete
  10. 'In the larger sense, Our Town is in a world of hurt, '

    Certainly your town of would be useful idiots (but in reality useless idiots) for Trump is totally butthurt. If Somerby were not a Trumptard and a defender of DJT, Roy Moore, Ron Johnson, Devin Nunes and Matt Gaetz, he might not be in a world of hurt.

    ReplyDelete
  11. ‘As published, Severson's dateline was "DIRT TOWN VALLEY, Ga." That's a very colorful name, but, for better or worse, Dirt Town Valley isn't exactly a place in the normal journalistic sense.’

    From Marshall’s own website:
    ‘The Scoggins family has farmed the Dirt Town Valley for close to 200 hundred years’
    https://www.mountainmamafarms.com/about

    From the Chatooga County Historical Society:
    Dirt Town Valley
    Communities in Dirt Town Valley
    https://www.chattoogahistory.org/communities/dirt-town-valley/

    ReplyDelete
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