Ralph Eubanks – When It’s Darkness on the Delta

Some today would cross off the Mississippi Delta as a backwater beyond redemption or a region where bad history happened, but W. Ralph Eubanks drives the area roads and small-town streets, meets the people who live and work there, some of whom strive hard to make it more than it is, and through his evocative writing he portrays not just the economic oppression but also the area’s resilience.

In his newest work of nonfiction, Eubanks, a son of Mississippi, looks at the region with a clear, if not dispassionate eye. Seeking further knowing about this particular area, he finds insights into the soul of America. Slavery got turned into sharecropping. Civil rights were cruelly suppressed under Jim Crow. Poverty became so entrenched, it has resisted any number of efforts to eradicate it—even the spending of millions of dollars.

He finds the pervasive inequality that hinders the expansive possibilities. As he writes, “The story of the Delta is not just a Mississippi story. Nor is it just a Southern story. At its very core, the Delta’s story is an American story. The idea of American exceptionalism has rendered the Delta and other places like it invisible since the story of the Delta is exceptional in only disturbing ways. By reckoning with the story of the Delta, we as Americans, can also begin to confront the other disadvantaged places like it that dot the American landscape, from sea to shining sea.”

W. Ralph Eubanks is a faculty fellow and writer in residence at the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture, where his work focuses on race, identity, and the American South. He is the author previously of two other works of nonfiction, Ever Is a Long Time and The House at the End of the Road, as well as A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through a Real and Imagined Literary Landscape. He has been a Guggenheim fellow and a Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow, as well as a recipient of the 2023 Mississippi Governor’s Arts Award for excellence in literature.

“To change what we see on the landscape, we have to change what we know about it.” — Ralph Eubanks

Hosted by William Miller

Key Takeaways:

• The Mississippi Delta is not an isolated regional problem but a national mirror, reflecting economic, racial, and political systems found throughout the United States.
• Race in America operates as an economic construct, with policies after slavery preserving inequality by separating political rights from economic power.
• Romanticized narratives of the Delta obscure the structural forces that created generational poverty, allowing poverty to be blamed on individuals rather than systems.
• Lasting change depends on sustained local leadership and historical truth-telling, not outside saviors or short-term philanthropic fixes.

#MississippiDelta #AmericanPoverty #RaceAndEconomics

Find out more about Ralph Eubanks and his books, you can visit his website here.

His books for sale here.

Follow and connect with him on Instagram, and Facebook.

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