At the County Fair, a Fantasy of Whiteness

The county fair matters. In much of the rural United States, such fairs have remained financial linchpins for decades, in some places centuries, with the biggest generating millions in revenue. Even now, after their heyday in the mid-twentieth century, they are massively attended: the Erie County, New York fair brought in 1.2 million people in 2017; the Wilson County, Tennessee fair nearly 500,000; even smaller fairs often surpass 100,000 attendees.

The fair is also ubiquitous, with at least one in every state, and lots of fairs in certain states. They loom over late summer and early fall, a topic of chatter and ads on local radio, a keynote of the place and season. They are staged in sprawling, dusty fields, and they feel like many events that don’t cost much: unhurried and unpretentious. Fairs remain financially and socially vital for those with a stake in agriculture—for many rural people, the fair is the largest commercial event they will attend all year—and they still occupy a regular place on the calendar even for many people who don’t.

As spaces of political imagination, fairs are equally important. The fair’s racial scene is especially revealing. American studies scholar Trent Watts, writing in 2002, called the annual Neshoba, Mississippi county fair a “Disneyesque ‘Southland,’ a racially segregated imagining of a Mississippi town.” An array of cabins—100 percent white-owned in a county that is 25 percent black—lined the fairgrounds. Visitors could stroll past porches or even go inside for a neighborly glass of lemonade, as though they were on a white-only holiday. The only black people to be found had been hired as servants for the fair. They were not kept in the background,