While I’m certainly not an apologist for Jesse, Al and crew, there are still some pockets of dumbass white trash in Louisiana. These are also the people largely responsible for electing Blanco over Jindal last time around because Jindal wasn’t white enough.
Excellent points.
Unfortunately, this is still very, very true, and I'm afraid it may always be true. When two peoples who have lived side by side still can't get along after four hundred years I think you can safely (and sadly) agree that that's the way it's always going to be.
One problem with singling out ignorant white trash for criticism, however, is that it completely ignores the fact that every single ethnic, cultural, and population group in the world has its ignorant, bigoted trash, but they tend to get a free pass because "ain't they quaint?" I'm sure that after living here four hundred years American Blacks may not be big fans of newcomers but you're certainly never going to hear about it. And I'm certain that urban Italian-Americans (just for another example) also probably have some bigots among them. But everyone is given a free pass except for the poorest and most ignorant of rural whites because (I suppose) everyone thinks that the poor whites who live in ramshackle hovels and rusting trailers are the people who created and defended slavery. The wealthy, educated, quasi-European gentry of the ante-bellum South have vanished from the popular imagination to be replaced by dirt-poor whites whose only difference from Blacks is their skin color.
Actually, what it boils down to is that Hegelianism requires a thesis and an antithesis. Poor Blacks are the thesis whose ever act and thought is justified (even when those acts and thoughts are identical to those of poor whites) while poor whites make the perfect antithesis. It's almost as if wealth white liberals look on Blacks as the "good son" and poor whites as the "bad son."
Also, despite the fact that they are among the least alien of all population groups the celebrants of "otherness" seem to have latched onto American Blacks as the most "other" of all. If aliens from another planet were to get in a row with Blacks I predict liberals would side with the Blacks and conservatives would side with the space aliens. But then, people tend to resent those they have wronged anyway and we have never, so far as I know, wronged any space aliens. But I'm sure if anyone can do such a thing it will be us "evil" rednecks!
No one looks good in Jena, but the white trash is looking worse, in my book.