Posted on 05/17/2005 10:26:50 AM PDT by Destro
THE REDNECK PROBLEM
By WILLIAM RASPBERRY
May 17, 2005 -- THE plight of have-not blacks in America's urban ghettos, says economist Thomas Sowell, can be laid at the feet of white people. And not just any white folks. The culprits are that particular breed of white people known as "rednecks."
If you've followed the writings of Sowell for as long as I have, you'll know that he's not saying anything as simple as racism accounts for today's black poverty. He's saying something much more complex and, to my mind, far more intriguing.
Immigration from the British Isles to the New World was not so random as many of us imagine. Most of the settlers of Massachusetts, for instance, came from near Haverhill in East Anglia. Virginia aristocrats came from the south and west of England.
And the Deep South was populated largely by immigrants from the northern borderlands, Ulster and the Scottish Highlands — from "among people who were called 'rednecks' and 'crackers' in Britain before they ever saw America." And these are the people who formed the culture — the speech patterns, preaching styles, social behaviors, propensity for violence and attitudes toward schooling — that became the culture of Southern blacks, Sowell claims in his new book, "Black Rednecks and White Liberals."
And it is this cultural heritage, he argues, "more so than survivals of African cultures," that has produced the urban black culture of today.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Rednecks
Drive pickup trucks
Drink beer
Chew tobacco
Shoot bolt action rifles off of their porch
Own a really fat black lab
Young urban blacks
Drive bass speakers on wheels
Drink gin
Smoke crack
Shoot uzi's from a moving vehicle
Own a scarred-up pit bull
I don't see the similarity. ;-)
Though in Virginia there were laws which prevented free blacks from owning property, there were free blacks who started corporations. The corporations had no color, and were permitted to buy and control property. The corporations also purchased slaves (usually the relatives of the stock holders) essentially giving them their freedom, with the opportunity to work off their debt to the corporation.
Slavery was dieing. It depended on keeping the slaves ignorant, which meant keeping the agriculture methods simple, ruining the land over time. Cotton was being grown in India and Egypt, limiting the price advantage of large slave worked plantations.
Slavery had a boom due to the Whitney cotton gin, the first fruits of the industrial revolution. As the industrial revolution progressed, skills of eye and hand meant more and more, so slavery, depending on force and ignorance, was doomed. In the old south, having a real job was a mark of degradation. The southern aristocracy refused to accept the failure of their system. The real tragedy was the poor whites whose coerced militia service supported the oppression of the black and the safety of the rich, and whose deaths in the Civil War served only the institution that kept them poor.
"the term 'southern cracker' was used in the south to describe the southern cowboys who used whips to herd cattle."
I'd always associated it with plantation overseers, myself, as in "cracking the whip."
You can tell by the Irish and Scottish surnames Blacks have that the contact period was long and intimate.
Many of the Sephardics left Spain because of the Inquisition began by Ferdinand and Isabella. Dispossesed in Spain, they went to the Mideast, many to Syria, to be dispossesed again after 1948 because of the creation of Israel.
ping for later read
I didn't know Burl Ives ever sang Delia's Gone. Johnny Cash wrote it, didn't he?
I assume you're being sarcastic. Most blacks have ANGLO names; not Scottish or Irish. The Scotch-Irish (aka Ulster Scots) largely lived in the mountainy areas where the slave economy couldn't function; many of them probably rarely or never even saw a slave.
And these gens libre du coleur were often very important citizens- in the larger cities of the south--New Orleans had the largest, and the most interesting. Both Frank Yerby and Anne Rice sold quite a few books writing about them.
Celts are not Anglo-Saxon.
" The real tragedy was the poor whites whose coerced militia service supported the oppression of the black and the safety of the rich, and whose deaths in the Civil War served only the institution that kept them poor."
What a load of DU pavlovian trigger phrases this is... coerced? You have no idea what you're talking about.
You know what, I wouldn't be shocked if Ice-T wasn't a Republican in reality too. Also happens to be my favorite character on SVU.
You must remember the Northern population of Blacks was smaller than the Southern population. Also the North was more hostile to Blacks than the South was in many ways. After the NYC Draft Riots, New York was almost free of Blacks until Southern Blacks migrated north in the early 1900s.
Your post #15.............BINGO!!!
If Redneck culture really is Scottish, they aren't Anglo-Saxon but Celts. "WASP" isn't a term in much use anymore, its popularity having peaked decades ago.
"Many of the Sephardics left Spain because of the Inquisition began by Ferdinand and Isabella. Dispossesed in Spain, they went to the Mideast, many to Syria"
Not entirely true. Some fled to Alsace and converted to Protestantism. I know because this was the experience of one of my (distant) ancestors.
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