John Rider - Race in American History and Political Economy
After graduation, John Rider attended the University of Oxford, where he completed a Masters of Science in Social Anthropology, with honors. Thereafter John attended Harvard Law School, where he was the first Juris Doctor student affiliate of the Harvard Human Rights Program. John served as a teaching fellow in courses on cross-worldview negotiation, undertook clinical work as a litigator serving incarcerated members of minority faiths in American federal penitentiaries, conducted pre-litigation investigative work on slavery in supply chains and on conservation-related indigenous displacement across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and served as Editor in Chief of Volume 38 of the Harvard Human Rights Journal. John also served as a legal fellow with Minority Rights Group in London, UK, and Kampala, UG, where he worked on submissions to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and undertook work on cases concerning crimes against humanity and violence against indigenous and minority groups in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, and D.R. Congo. John graduated Harvard Law School in 2025 and is now transitioning into a role as an attorney in London.
Area of Concentration Courses
Geography 110 – Critical Economic Geographies
American Studies 101AC – The Business of American Popular Culture: Race, Class, Ethnicity and the Birth of Consumer Society
African American Studies 100 –Black Intellectual Thought
African American Studies 142AC – Race in American Film
Geography 155 – Race, Space and Inequality
Thesis
Making Monsters, “Hillbillies,” the “Monstrous Rural,” and the Reinvention of Whiteness’ Internal Other for Neoliberal White Supremacy
Driven by political work undertaken concurrent to his time at Berkeley, as well as by field work and interviews conducted in rural eastern Kentucky in early 2020, John’s thesis responded to the ascendant popularity of “Trumpsplaining” media in the post-2016 political period, such as the book Hillbilly Elegy. John’s thesis examined the history of how the “hillbilly” was invented and imbued with political salience as a subject at the margins of American whiteness. He traced the term’s political mobilization through the 20th and into the 21st century, and its renewed relevance as the central subject of blame for many narrators attempting to explain how the first Trump administration came into political force. His thesis argued that the hillbilly political-fiction provided a convenient, discrete, and locatable scapegoat class which allowed the obfuscation of the substantially broader and more intricate drivers of Trumpist politics.
