Kenny Powers, former baseball phenom, favorite son of Shelby, North Carolina, returns to his hometown after flaming out of the major leagues in humiliating fashion; this is the premise of the first season of Eastbound & Down, a show that tells the story of the complex and fragile racial position of lower-class whites in the American South. Its protagonist, Powers, is a mulleted, swaggering redneck with a proclivity for dramatic monologues, a sort of Dixie Hamlet possessed of the prince’s sense of self-importance but with his ambivalence replaced by absolute certainty of his own greatness. His deeds and utterances drive the show, which may at first seem to be a collection of cheap laughs at the expense of some hicks but is actually rather nuanced – as you’re chuckling at the racist antics of Powers you’re also feeling empathy with him, forcing you to reevaluate the moral judgements you made freely only minutes before. The point is nothing in Eastbound & Down is as simple as it seems, not even whiteness in the heart of the former Confederacy, and that to fully understand it (the whiteness) requires the viewer to be seized by some uncomfortable associations. To understand the Southern racist, you must drive a mile in his pickup truck.

The show does not deceive its viewer as to Kenny’s beliefs. To the contrary, they are nearly the first things you learn about him, and they are unpleasant: prejudices against black people, jewish people, gay people, all forthrightly expressed during interviews in various pro baseball locker rooms. He’s knocked out of baseball, and is shown driving back into Shelby finishing beers and tossing them out his window. Eastbound aired on HBO, and it’s fair to say declaring proudly one’s bigotry and littering the casualties of domestic brews swallowed while operating a motor vehicle are outside the milieu of most people who subscribe to an expensive channel to see complex characters’ nihilistic ruminations on the banality of evil as well as tastefully shot sex scenes. To that audience, Kenny is an oddity to be gawked at, a confirmation of their worst fears: the U.S South is an alien land full of unreachable bigots with whom they have nothing in common.

But there is a trick here. The viewer will quickly come to identify with Kenny Powers. Not because his views are secretly less repulsive than they appear, but because empathy is possible despite them. Soon after he bumps back into town, he goes to a training session for substitute teachers, where the other attendees recognize him and chuckle about his professional downfall. On his first day of work, his boss, Terrence Cutler, the school’s principal, jokes about how the once-mighty Kenny Powers now works beneath him at a middle school; to add insult to injury, Culter is engaged to Kenny’s high school sweetheart, April, for whom Kenny still has romantic feelings. These and other sundry humiliations – having to move in with his brother Dustin, getting made fun of by his students – earn Kenny the sympathy of the viewer. It’s hard not to see a guy in an ill-fitting school polo shirt and a mullet be repeatedly embarrassed and not feel bad for him, and to remember moments where you might have been similarly disrespected; here, empathy blossoms. This identification is fostered by Kenny’s placement as the protagonist of the story, the hero who provides the “primary point of view” (Cohen 257). The camera is deployed so the viewer sees from Kenny’s perspective, and his monologues describe both the action and the feelings it engenders in him; it’s difficult to avoid seeing the story through his eyes.

This of course presents a contradiction. How can well-meaning viewers with an egalitarian racial spirit see themselves in an inveterate racist who has no qualms about sharing his beliefs? Eastbound slyly evades this question by taking aim at whiteness, trying to pull back the curtain on the idea of it as a monolithic identity and reveal its internal tensions and contradictions. One of the show’s main antagonists, Cutler, is a white person of a very different sort than Kenny. His sport is triathlon, and the show delights in showing him in form-fitting bicycle outfits and swimming gettups to reveal his thin-yet-gelatinous physique. His copulation with April involves rickety thrusting and awkward banter. He’s feckless in dealing with students, and communicates awkwardly with his staff. But, despite his weaknesses, he can embarrass Kenny. At a backyard barbeque thrown by him and April, Cutler drunkenly mocks Powers for being a baseball has-been, a failure now condemned to the humiliation of teaching gym at a middle school taking orders from people who once watched him on television. Notably, Cutler speaks sans southern accent. It’s this detail that reveals the point of Cutler’s diatribe. Cutler is strange and sad, yet he has power enough to crush a former World Series champion emotionally and marry his love to boot; in making this possible, the show argues that the most feeble northerner has the power to humiliate a successful embodiment of the rural south. The viewers’ identification with Kenny means they see this verbal attack as an injustice, and absorb the intended message: poor southerners are frequently slighted by a culture that prioritizes northern notions of white identity.

It’s not just the north that attacks Kenny’s rural whiteness. Ashley Schaeffer, Kenny’s other primary foe, owns a BMW dealership, lives in a plantation house passed down from his ancestors, has white hair, wears white suits, and speaks with an exaggerated patrician drawl; he is the very embodiment of the Southern landed gentry. Schaeffer, knowing Kenny is back in Shelby, offers him meager sums – sometimes paid out in coupons to local businesses – to put on, at Ashley Schaeffer BMW, exhibitions of a fastball he can no longer throw. It’s essentially his humiliation displayed and exchanged for cash, and Kenny loathes it so much he decides on a petty form of revenge. He returns at night and drunkenly tosses a cinder block through the window of a dealership BMW and then drives away. This act heightens rather than underscores the embarrassment the viewer feels for Powers. He cannot stand up to his tormentor to his face – he looks like a fool when he tries – so he must return to defile one car in a lot full of them; this act is captured on film and used to blackmail him later. Again, the divisions between the types of white people are stark: the wealthy, upper-class southerner can exploit his redneck counterpart to sell pre-owned vehicles and the latter has no recourse.

This sense of abuse, having been beaten down, wears on a person. Kenny decides to swallow his pride and become a glasses-wearing teacher who takes his responsibilities seriously, polo shirt tucked into zipper-sided sweatpants; he turns down an offer for a pitch-off at Ashley Schaeffer BMW between himself and his nemesis from his pro baseball days, Reg Mackworthy. He also helps his brother out with his contracting business, where the two of them are subject to further belittling, this time from a rich professional house flipper for whom they’re constructing a sunroom. She berates the two at length, a verbal bludgeoning they endure until Dustin, pushed to the brink, declares that they’re done working for the day, and that he and Kenny are headed to the BMW dealership so his pro baseball-playing brother can prove himself again in a pitch-off. It’s a moment of triumph, not only for Dustin and Kenny, but also for the lower-class white trash group to which they belong, a victory the show underscores with dialogue; as they depart, Kenny calls the house-flipper a “city bitch” while she mutters “rednecks” under her breath. In emphasizing the intra-racial conflict present in both the sunroom scene and the subsequent pitch-off, the stakes are raised – the fight is no longer about Kenny trying to prove himself to the people of Shelby, but instead of a southern white redneck identity fighting to stay respected in a world that is hostile to it.

And in this battle the rednecks win. April hears on the radio the announcement of the upcoming pitch-off while lubing up Cutler before a triathlon; she breaks her promise to see him at the finish line to watch Kenny try to return to former glory. Her presence spurs him on, and he delivers a blazing fastball that knocks Mackworthy’s eye out. It’s a victory over Cutler, whose fiance leaves him for Kenny, and over Schaeffer, whose promotion intended to humiliate Kenny ends with an eye on his dealership floor and Powers’s fastball velocity back in the triple digits. Kenny celebrates by smashing BMW windows with hurled baseballs, an act once done at night as proof of his cultural impotence redone in the daylight as proof of triumph. In having Kenny symbolically defeat both the condescending northerner and the wealthy southern plantation owner, the show celebrates the redneck identity of its protagonist and argues against its cultural demonization.

But Eastbound does not savor the pleasure of Kenny’s symbolic victory. It punishes the viewers for their identification with Kenny by reminding them of his racism. In no sense is he a changed man. This is evident in his confrontations with Mackworthy when he feels the need to point out his rival’s blackness as a knock against him. Even more egregious is his chat with a pro executive for Tampa who informs him that, after seeing the return of his fastball, the team is looking to sign him, that they need a “shot of personality”, and asks if the racism and homophobia that once made him famous are beliefs he still holds. Kenny cheerfully informs him that his prejudices are the same, and the pro scout reacts positively – inflammatory comments brings fans to the stadium. The audience, rooting for Kenny’s success, have been duped into supporting a racist who succeeds not despite his bigotry but because of it. In building Powers up to be a hero who represents a group of people, promoting audience identification with him, and then rewarding him for holding the stereotypical prejudices of that group, the show can be seen as a tacit endorsement of those values. Never change, and society will reward you eventually.

This analysis would hold true if Eastbound & Down concluded with a victorious Kenny returning to the major leagues. It does not. He receives a call as he’s about to leave Shelby for Tampa saying the offer has been revoked, that no team in the big leagues wants to sign him. The idea that racism would end up a benefit for him is shown to be a fiction. This reversal changes the meaning of his previous triumphs. When he knocked out Mackworthy’s eye, showed up Schaeffer, and won back April from Cutler, the expectation was for future success – that defeating his foes meant a demonstrably better life ahead for him. Instead, he is humiliated once more. The racism for which he was once rewarded is shown to be an anachronism, the remnant of a system used to suture together an alliance between whites of the upper and lower class; see Kenny facing off against Mackworthy, both of them being exploited by Schaeffer for profit, but opposed nonetheless (Mahoney 133). But that system of white alliance is fraying at the seams. The divisions between whites are sharper than ever, the conflict playing out on lines of identity: north versus south, rich versus poor, city versus country. Eastbound & Down reveals and plays out those conflicts, only to say that they do not matter. While being the most talented or favored white person might have once meant automatic success, it does not now. You, the redneck, can win, see your ideological foes bested, and be left with nothing in the end. Whiteness doesn’t mean as much as it once did. It’s this author’s opinion that this change means a better, fairer society, but realizing it is going to leave Kenny Powers and many others like him crying in the front seat of their cars. It’s a harsh reality, but one we’re going to have to acclimate ourselves to as a culture. The alternatives are too unpleasant to bear.