I recently had dinner on a patio off Market Square. The food met all expectations, the early autumn Knoxville weather shined like a diamond, and I relished the sounds of a language I could not identify floating through the air from a nearby table. As we left, I expressed my pleasure at hearing the language and asked where the group was from and if they’d tell me the language. It was Finnish. Two were visiting from the country and their tablemates had moved to the states. I welcomed them and felt the evening was better for their presence.
I had not heard the word “interloper” (noun: a person who becomes involved in a place or situation where they are not wanted or are considered not to belong) in years before it popped up in a recent comment on this website. I’m not certain I’d ever heard it used seriously.
It brought immediately to mind (who knows why or how the mind works?) two other words: Carpetbaggers (noun, derogatory, informal: a political candidate who seeks election in an area where they have no local connections or historically (in the US) a person from the northern states who went to the South after the Civil War to profit from the Reconstruction or more generally, a person perceived as an unscrupulous opportunist) and Scalawags (US: a white Southerner who collaborated with northern Republicans during Reconstruction, often for personal profit. The term was used derisively by white Southern Democrats who opposed Reconstruction legislation).
I grew up in Alabama hearing these terms, often from the lips of George Wallace who used them freely to relay his suspicion of those who saw the world from a different lens than his own. All the words indicated an outsider who was not welcome. While the terms may be archaic southernisms in some respects, they must still have meaning, right? So, I began to think about interlopers in terms of Knoxville. We’ve all noticed or felt in some way or another the increase in our population due to others moving here. It can contribute to some discomfort with housing and jobs and it seems to have wildly escalated. But has it? I looked it up to test my own perception.
According to Macrotrends.net Knoxville’s metro (the region surrounding the core of the city) area has grown over the years. Their records go back to 1950 when there were around 149,000 people in the metro area. There has never been a drop in population, but it grew very slowly, by less than 2% a year, through 1970. For reasons I don’t know, the area grew faster through the 1970s, running about 3% to 4% a year. It dropped back for a few years, then ran about 3% growth each year from the 1990s through the 2000-teens. For the last several years, the rate has slowed, dropping below 2% each of the last three years.
Before you cry foul and say it can’t be so, please remember the power of compounding percentages. A smaller percentage growth now represents a larger number of people than was the case decades ago. In 1970 the metro-area population was 192,000 while the current population for the area is 796,000. So a leap of about 4.5% in 1972 netted 9,000 new citizens while the 1.53% so far this year nets us 12,000. In real numbers we added just under 20,000 a year through the end of the 2000-teens and that has slowed slightly since 2021.
The population within the actual city limits is a different matter. After remaining stagnant for decades, the city population exploded in the 1960s, going from 111,827 in 1960 to 174,187 in 1970 (+56.1%). At that point it pretty much stopped growing for forty years, reaching only 178,874 in 2010. That’s about the time Americans began looking, again, toward center cities, and urban areas experienced an increase in population.
I was one of those people, moving from West Knox County into downtown in 2009. By 2020 we had added almost twelve thousand to the population inside the city limits to reach 190,740. It’s not a large increase until you consider that in one decade, we added nearly 2 1/2 times the number we added in the previous forty years. In that context, it is quite an escalation. The current estimation of 198,000+ just three years later suggests a continuing rapid increase.
So, how do we respond? As a city that prides itself on being friendly and welcoming, do we live up to our self-perception or do we declare the newcomers “interlopers,” and suggest they go back to from whence they came? And where do we draw the line? Who precisely are the interlopers?
Is it geographic? For example, if someone moves here from Seymour or Maryville, is that OK, or are we looking at an interloper? Is East Tennessee acceptable, but anyone from Nashville or beyond is complicit in interlopedness? Is the region OK, but not outside the southeast? Are we good with Texas, but not California? Virginia, but not New York? We need to know where the line sits.
Or is it duration of residency? If someone moved here after 2020 are they interlopers? Is the line 2000? Am I still an interloper after moving to Knox County in 1982? Is legit residency awarded by birth only and all others are interlopers? So, in that case, I’m an interloper, but not my daughter? Or does interlopocity stain the following generations and even my daughter and her children (second generation by birth) are so condemned? In that case, newsbreak: We are all interlopers. Even those whose families came here in colonial times interloped on the Cherokee who, guess what? had interloped on the Yuchi people and others who had been here for about 3,000 years.
I think most people who would look at new people through this lens, would consider interlopers to be anyone who came after them. Basically Interloper-amnesty ended just after they arrived. I got here in 1982, so that means about a half million of y’all are interloping on my Knoxville! Does that give me a special rank?
It’s all silly, of course. People move around and that’s a fact we can’t really predict or much control. Knoxville has seen waves of immigrants from all over, including other countries and they weren’t always shown the red carpet. Some of them stayed, thrived, and made the city a better place. For example, what is more Knoxville than the name Kern? Peter Kern (Kern’s Bakery, Kern’s Food Hall, Peter Kern Library) was born in Germany. He fought in the civil war for the South before being captured and held in Knoxville. He liked it. He made baked goods, established himself, and eventually became mayor. Not shabby for an interloper.
And he made Knoxville a better place than it would otherwise have been. Do you old timers remember the smell of fresh-baked bread in south Knoxville back in the day? Thank Peter Kern. Often, that’s what interlopers do: Even if they aren’t welcomed, they make Knoxville a better place. I dare say some people who are born here would have a hard time claiming they made the city better. So, the next time you encounter an interloper, and you are about to go all nativist on them, consider this may be the person who makes your city a better place.
Or simply remember that we claim to be welcoming and friendly and that how we treat strangers says more about us than any claim.