Summary: Today, counties across the U.S. organize county fairs during the summer months. For millions of Americas, fairs have come to signify family-friendly community entertainment, complete with an assortment of fried and comfort foods, carnival rides, tractor pulls, 4-H and agricultural demonstrations, and other symbols (real and mythical) of rural life. Sport and the active body is often a key component of fair entertainment, arriving in the form of rodeos, racing competitions involving farming equipment and lawnmowers, guns, even the presence of military booths testing participants on their physical strength. County fairs in the United States, however, are also entertainment spaces rife with political meaning and shaped by the racial divisions of the nation. Scholar Benjamin Tausig considers county fairs a “fantasy of whiteness”: not only are they spaces typically predominated by white Americans, they are spaces of “political imagination” with “severe racial overtones” powered through symbols (like the Confederate Flag) and a accompanying and surrounding silence that emboldens their meaning. This episode, posted on the eve of county fair season for this summer of 2019, takes a critical look at county fairs through the lens of race, Whiteness, sound, and sport/leisure. We interview Dr. Benjamin Tausig about his ethnographic research on county fairs, and his arguments that county fairs constitute a “fantasy of Whiteness” powered by symbols and silence.
