Monica Potts > Quotes

“When I was little, I thought that when people were drunk they were drunk forever. Later, I learned that this is not true. Even later, I learned that sometimes it is.”
― Monica Potts, The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America

“There was no way I wasn’t going. I was going to leave this stupid town and its stupid rocky soil where nothing grew and where children were buried; its stupid churches and hypocritical Holy Rollers; its stupid schools and the principal who, I thought, had kicked my best friend out of school; its poverty and its poverty of imagination; its low expectations; its girls who were expected to wear makeup and curl their hair and marry so young and produce an endless supply of babies; its stupid selective mourning, this stupid town that cared more about people who died than those who lived and struggled and couldn’t find their way.”
― Monica Potts

“My community really was poor, not just in people’s incomes but in the way their lack of money and experience trapped them in a tight echo chamber, allowing something untrue to become conventional wisdom. This kind of place will remain insular if people are discouraged from branching out, from trying new things. The people who do the discouraging think they’re doing it for the good of the students, but they’re giving them bad advice. This is how some small towns fail even their smartest, most ambitious kids.”
― Monica Potts

“Where women must give themselves up to the unknowable and divine plans of God, there is no such thing as an unplanned pregnancy. Arkansas has one of the strongest anti-abortion populations in the country. Even as other parts of the country relaxed their attitudes on abortion and women’s reproductive choices, in Arkansas the opposition became even stronger. Most of the women I knew growing up weren’t even regularly on birth control.”
― Monica Potts

“The girls still in school would pass their babies around, playing. It was an endless churn, baby after baby, born to the young and raised in families that spanned five or six generations because so few years separated grandmothers and mothers and daughters—and because the girls couldn’t take care of them without help. All that mattered to people, it seemed, was the endless creation of life itself; the quality of it was never evaluated and never came into the equation.”
― Monica Potts

“Arkansas has had, and continues to have, one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the United States, even as the nationwide rate has declined since 1991. The characteristics predictive of teen births tend to be the same regardless of race or ethnicity: teen mothers tend to live in communities where their mothers were young mothers themselves and to have only a high school degree. The neighborhoods are poorer, and employment
levels are low. Wherever poverty exists, girls carry the burden of early motherhood.”
― Monica Potts

“Political scientists, [Isabel] Wilkerson writes, call white Americans’ response to recent social changes “dominant group status threat.” Consciously or not, they feel they are entitled to some measure of security and comfort based on their whiteness, to privileges that were afforded previous generations of their families, and they react with cultural fury and depression when that is threatened. They benefited from a system that relied on the oppression of people of color, especially Black Americans, but they resisted that truth.”
― Monica Potts

“When Trump voters revolted, when they stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, part of what they wanted restored was a racial caste system that ranked them nearer the top because they were white: the Confederate battle flags they carried that day gave them away.”
― Monica Potts

“So I decided to return to my Ozark hometown, with its aging, shrinking population, governed by a small group of people who worshipped at the same churches as their parents and who had knit around themselves an ever thicker and tighter web of personal and political self-deceits.”
― Monica Potts

“But when evangelical voters talk about values, they mean public values, not their personal relationship with Jesus. According to Christian values, a public school should ban all the books with naughty words in them, because if you believe God would object to those books, then no one should read them. This is how religion becomes less a personal belief system than a tool for social control.”
― Monica Potts

“A third of Arkansas’s population lives in a distressed zip code. These places, where the least educated white Americans are clustered, are unlikely ever to recover.”
― Monica Potts

“At its peak, Arkansas had the second-highest rate of meth use in the country. Overall use dipped for a short time when laws on selling Sudafed changed in 2005. But in the years when Darci was searching for whatever drug she could find, the rates of use for Arkansas remained relatively high compared to the rest of the United States.”
― Monica Potts

“And if you were to place a map of white evangelical Protestants over maps of women dying young and overdosing on drugs and going without jobs, they’d line up. Poor white people with the least education, who live in areas with high concentrations of evangelical Protestants, are the ones who are dying young.”
― Monica Potts

“Evangelical Christianity is conservative and authoritarian, and I didn't like it. It led me to suspect religion in general and to believe that Christianity was constraining and antiwoman. I came to this worldview early, and since then, the way I've seen evangelical Christians interact with the world at large and in national politics has mostly confirmed those impressions.”
― Monica Potts

“A study from the American Communities Project at the Michigan State University School of Journalism on rural counties published in 2019 found that the counties that are doing the best economically are those that welcome new immigrants. Immigrants open new businesses and inject local economies with much-needed energy. Counties that encourage artists to move in and build artistic communities also thrive. But Arkansans—and denizens of rural counties across the United States—vote and respond to national events in ways that are hostile to immigration, hostile to anyone from outside their own communities. They support presidents and senators and policies that would close the borders, cut taxes to nothing, and pass initiatives preventing schools from teaching about racism accurately.”
― Monica Potts

“In the summer of 2020, many people in Clinton were more frightened of Black Lives Matter protests, all of which were peaceful, around the state, than they were of Covid-19.”
― Monica Potts

“In a 2018 analysis conducted for The New York Times, Caitlin Myers, a Middlebury College economist who studies reproductive health, found that the average age at which a woman in Arkansas has her first child is twenty-two, as opposed to twenty-six nationally. The high rate of teen births is pulling the state’s average down. In general, over the past few generations, the average age at which women become mothers has been going up, but that trend is strongly influenced by education level.”
― Monica Potts

“It doesn’t matter to people in Clinton how destitute they are, how fundamentally poor the soil is, how frayed its social safety net. It doesn’t matter that the antigovernment sentiment they espouse is heading to a nihilistic endpoint calling on the government to cut valuable programs they use themselves. Or that their outrage over taxation only helps the kind of wealthy people who don’t live in Clinton. It doesn’t matter to them that they have more in common with poor people of color than with rich white people. The white women in this community don’t seem concerned that the systems they support shield their abusers and circumscribe their lives. Their inheritance came down to them as land, so that’s what they want to protect. They concentrate on their own personal redemption, even as their communities are dying. It makes them withdraw from one another, ever further from a sense of community, so that people like Darci, who suffer the most, struggle to find anything safe to grab on to.”
― Monica Potts

“White nationalism and anti-abortion politics often go hand in hand. Rules and norms are created around white women, ostensibly to protect them, but they have, in truth, kept them down; at the same time, white women, near but not at the center of power, have throughout history helped enforce the very systems that subjugate them to the men in their communities.”
― Monica Potts

“In response to the high rate of teen births, the people of my hometown turned to the evangelical churches. In 1993 the Southern Baptists founded True Love Waits, an organization that promoted abstinence until marriage in place of comprehensive sex education. My friends began to wear “promise rings” in middle school, public signs of their pledge to remain virgins until they were married. Because some of them already had serious boyfriends, they dedicated these “promise rings” to their boyfriends, sort of as pre-engagement rings. In other words, we were thinking about marriage at thirteen and fourteen—before we were thinking about high school.”
― Monica Potts

“Arkansas has had, and continues to have, one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the United States, even as the nationwide rate has declined since 1991. The characteristics predictive of teen births tend to be the same regardless of race or ethnicity: teen mothers tend to live in communities where their mothers were young mothers themselves and to have only a high school degree. The neighborhoods are poorer, and employment levels are low. Wherever poverty exists, girls carry the burden of early motherhood.”
― Monica Potts

“It was an endless churn, baby after baby, born to the young and raised in families that spanned five or six generations because so few years separated grandmothers and mothers and daughters—and because the girls couldn't take care of them without help. All that mattered to people, it seemed, was the endless creation of life itself: the quality of it was never evaluated and never came into the equation.”
― Monica Potts

“Alexandria Walton Radford, a sociologist who is now at the American Institutes for Research and studies why and how students make college decisions, told me that the middle- and upper income high school students she interviewed almost never brought up the issue of nearness to home. But low-income students were accustomed both to family emergencies and to being part of their family’s solution to them, a grown-up burden their wealthier counterparts did not have to bear.”
― Monica Potts

“My community was really poor, not just in people's incomes but in the way their lack of money and experience trapped them in a tight echo chamber, allowing something untrue to become conventional wisdom. This kind of place will remain insular if people are discouraged from branching out, from trying new things. The people who do the discouraging think they're doing it for the good of the students, but they're giving them bad advice. This is how some small towns fail even their smartest, most ambitious kids.”
― Monica Potts, The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America

“In 1999 a Columbia University graduate student in economics, Adriana Lleras-Muney, found that each additional year of education led to a longer life. It’s a tight correlation—education is a stronger link to a longer life than even household income.”
― Monica Potts

“A 2016 survey from the Public Religion Research Institute and The Atlantic found that 57 percent of white adults who lived in their hometowns preferred Donald Trump in that year’s presidential election, compared with 40 percent of those who lived farther than a two-hour drive from where they’d grown up. This points to a feedback loop for the insular, small-town dynamic: the people who think their small towns are the best often haven’t lived far away for a significant period of time and so don’t have a solid basis for comparison.”
― Monica Potts

“In Van Buren County, only 15.8 percent of residents have at least a bachelor’s degree.”
― Monica Potts

“It was as if the town’s worst traits—religious judgment, disapproval of the girls who went boy crazy, lack of sexual education, and low expectations for girls overall—had crystallized in her pregnancy and then quietly buried themselves within her body, a weight to carry for the rest of her life.”
― Monica Potts

“In 2019 the Centers for Disease Control found that Arkansas has the highest rate of childhood trauma, with 56 percent of its children experiencing at least one devastating event. Our rural Arkansas culture has limited tools for dealing with traumas—people here lay them at God’s feet, as part of his plan. Epidemics of addiction, early deaths, occur in places where the groundwork has already been laid for devastation. The women dying early here were a symptom of a bigger truth, the measurable statistic that arose from a deeper wound.”
― Monica Potts

“The way Clinton approached the pandemic—passively accepting it, refusing to listen to science helped me understand how they’d approached the drug epidemic that had preceded, and was likely to continue after,
Covid-19.”
― Monica Potts