Insiders, Outsiders, and Class Anxiety

Abstract

This chapter compares Welty’s “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” with Bob Dylan’s “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” exploring the relationship between class, racist violence, and regional identity through examining the common assumptions both artists shared about Medgar Evers’ murderer and his motivations. The essay argues that class anxiety manifests itself both in acts of racist violence like Beckwith’s and in artistic conceptualizations of such violence as the exclusive domain of the white Southern underclass. The chapter also analyzes the ways in which the revisions that Welty made to the story after Beckwith’s arrest were connected to the class status, Southern identity, and racial consciousness of the killer. The resemblances between Dylan’s and Welty’s responses to the Evers murder show that the tendency to associate racist violence with the economic resentments of lower-class whites is evidenced among both Northern “outsiders” and Southern “insiders.”