Ford: Race and Rurality in American Prepper Culture

In “They Will Be Like a Swarm of Locusts:” Race, Rurality, and Settler Colonialism in American Prepping Culture, published in Rural Sociology, Allison E. Ford (Sociology, Sonoma State) engages with a sub-culture of Americans—called “preppers”—who “prepare for the collapse of society or ‘the end of the world as we know it.’” This sub-culture, in Ford’s telling, is intensely geographically focused, with “access to land, water, resources, and distance from the presumed danger of the urban core” closely connected to their enactment of “the national myth of a white, settler-colonial rural idyll.”

Using ethnographic research methods, participant observation and interviews with twenty-two preppers, Ford found preppers made claims both about their individual and racial superiority and the superiority of rural places. Of note, among the preppers Ford interviewed, all but three were white and all but three were men.

Preppers who were interviewed favorably compared themselves to those they viewed as naively unprepared for the failure of institutions or other disasters and presented a bootstrap individualism narrative about preparation. Preppers also maintained the superiority of rural areas. With self-sufficiency predicated on access to land, water, and resources, such self-sufficiency is linked with rural living, but preppers relied on tropes of rural communities and stereotypes of urban areas when asserting rural life is a responsible, rational, and morally superior to the “bastions of depravity” of urban areas.

Ford unpacks how preppers’ discourse is racialized and connected to preppers’ thoughts about cultural entitlement to land and ideas of rurality. They Will Be Like a Swarm of Locusts frames prepper narratives of the collapse of the world as part of a larger narrative focusing on the collapse of the presumed greatness of Euro-American civilization with the accompanying implicit national mythology of white American exceptionalism. Ford then concludes that the prepper narrative of rural superiority also “links colorblind racial ideology to the continued control of material resources upon which the settler state is predicated.”