Posted on 07/14/2005 6:10:21 AM PDT by robowombat
Bias against Southerners misses the mark By RICHARD COX Published July 11, 2005
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Does prejudice exist in Pasco County, an area with a very diverse population and seemingly very progressive?
I am certain that African-Americans, Hispanics and people from other countries, the poor and homeless, as well as members of certain religious faiths, experience treatment different from the mainstream populace. However, I am a member of a minority who has experienced attitudes and reactions from many individuals who assume that I am intellectually and socially challenged.
A very large percentage of the population of New Port Richey in particular is from the Northeast. I personally like the outspokenness, mince-no-words attitude, the ability to criticize as well as accept criticism without being offended, that seems to represent the culture in which Northerners grew up.
My family members seem to have the disadvantage of being born and living most of our lives in the South, in our case, Tennessee. I grew up in Knoxville, a city that many people seem to associate only with the fanatical behavior of our college football fans, and my wife is from a small city near Chattanooga.
There still seems to be a stereotype that some people associate with Tennesseans. When those individuals heard the distinct accent of my wife, my stepdaughter, and myself, it seemed to conjure up that redneck image one might associate with the humor of Jeff Foxworthy and other Southern comedians. That image is of a culture of ignorant hillbillies (certainly due to inbreeding!), barefoot, living in a shack with no indoor plumbing (but certainly an outhouse in back), having a dog living under the front porch, and owning an overgrown lawn populated with broken-down, dilapidated automobiles. And, yes, we all chew tobacco and sit on the front porch swing playing the banjo. Everyone also flies a Confederate flag and reminisces about the War Between the States.
I first noticed this attitude when my stepdaughter, an honor student, came home from middle school several days in tears because several other students harassed her daily, calling her an ignorant redneck and hillbilly among other derogatory terms. My wife and I have experienced the sudden change in facial expressions from many when they hear our accent. They seem to associate our accent with ignorance, and speak in simpler terms so that we can understand what they are saying. Telephone conversations often produce the same reaction.
I beg to differ. Tennessee is the home of several major universities, four major metropolitan areas with all the drug and gang problems associated with other large cities, and the most visited national park in the United States. Oak Ridge, in the Knoxville area, probably has as high a percentage of residents with doctorate degrees as any city in the United States. Tennessee has a musical heritage equal to none, and it is not exclusively country or bluegrass genres. Many nationally prominent politicians are from my home state, including three former presidents.
Tennessee has produced many famous musicians, actors, scientists and other intellectual and talented natives.
Well, to set the story straight, rural areas of most states have their own populace and dwellings that approach this stereotype.
My wife and I grew up in your average suburban neighborhoods, we both graduated from major universities and had successful professional careers, and, to risk seeming boastful, are probably as intelligent and knowledgeable, if not more so, than the average American. Believe it or not, East Tennessee, the section of the state we are from, fervently supported the Union during the Civil War.
I have noticed in the Pasco Times notices of meetings for various groups from areas of the Northeast and from other countries. Perhaps Southerners in our area should form a similar group. With apologies to an African-American group with a similar title, we could call our group the NAASF, the National Association for the Advancement of Southern Folks, Pasco County Branch. I hope there are enough local Southern residents available to attract to our organization.
--Richard Cox, a retired middle school science teacher and department head, lives in New Port Richey
And while Southerners do indeed come off as extremely friendly, in my experience, the friendliness is often cosmetic. For example, I can recall ....a mixed-race business meeting in Columbia, South Carolina......one of the good 'ol boys, who must of forgot that I was a Yankee, said right in front of me and five of his southern colleagues, "I really like Thomas. He's not a bad for a n....r." As soon as the words came out of his mouth, he knew he had made a mistake, but rather than keeping his mouth shut, he and his buddies started in with that smooth talking southern crap...160 posted on 07/14/2005 7:07:22 PM CDT by Labyrinthos
From your perspective though, I suppose I would have to give these guys credit for not trying to cover up their rudeness with a bunch of "smooth-talking cr-p." They were actually quite proud of their racist attiudes, and they didn't even think of apologizing. I guess that just makes them more "honest" though, right?
161 posted on 07/14/2005 7:15:29 PM CDT by bourbon
These gentlemen were not Southerners, they were stupid racists probably with relations going back to slave owners.
I've had my dealings with such people in the South and I hate them with a passion. I have personally chastised my own mother for using that word to describe one of my friends while in high school. To this day it still bothers me that she had done that. My experience of being raised in the South is that it is mostly a generational thing that hopefully will be stamped out in the South except in Florida where they will retire. I would slap my own child for referring to another human being in such a derogatory manner. It is uncivilized to behave in such a manner. [Emphasis supplied]260 posted on 07/15/2005 2:01:33 PM CDT by talmand
The above was an interesting exchange. May I comment?
I gather that, from the anecdote told by Labyrinthos, that he wants us to understand that, as a New Yorker, he suspects that Southerners are still unreconstructed racists, and all their professions of social progress and personal amelioration are facile self-service and untrustworthy; and that if a Northerner hadn't been present to hold the Southerners' feet to the fire, they'd have all relapsed and probably would have gone on talking as if they were at a Klan klavern.
I don't think bourbon got it.....far from "not trying to cover up their rudeness with a bunch of 'smooth-talking cr-p,'" that is exactly what they did, in Labyrinthos's retelling, precisely because the speaker suddenly realized that one of the visitors was still present.
But bourbon has a point, sort of, and I think Labyrinthos saw it, too, but discounted it, and that is that one of the speakers thought to say something favorable about the black businessman. The speaker, in so doing, laid his original low expectations on the table along with the compliment, then impaired the compliment by using country speech to describe his visitor. About which a further comment.
It seems to me that there has been a social struggle in progress since at least the 18th century and the first of the big slave revolts, when whites realized that having numbers of bondmen in their midst was a personal and physical danger, a point underscored by Roman history and the Servile War (Spartacus). In the ordinary course of business, slaves had access to tools that could become weapons in an eyeblink, and they often had access to firearms, about the supervision of which the first firearms laws in America were written as part of what were, to all intents, colonial black codes.
In the 18th century, New Yorkers shared the danger: there was at least one, perhaps two, significant conspiracies to raise slave revolts. In 1820's South Carolina, a further conspiracy fostered by Denmark Vesey was put down. In between, the successful slave revolt in Haiti in the 1790's killed every white person the slaves overtook, without exception, man, woman, and child. The only white person known to have escaped the slaughter after her estate was overrun was a plantation mistress who'd owned Toussaint L'Ouverture and who had hidden out in her outbuildings. She was found there by L'Ouverture, who, escaping from another property, returned to her plantation, and then concealed and protected her because she had taught him to read (illegally) and then given him books, and an education. L'Ouverture eventually conducted her to a French-held enclave (which I believe was later occupied by the British, who sustained an expedition there for some years in the 1790's) and then went on to a career in the French army and Haitian politics, before finally being imprisoned and constructively killed by the French who imprisoned him in an Alpine fortress in wintertime. Haiti, meanwhile, passed under the barbarous misrule of the slave-dictator Henri Christophe, who was eventually killed by his own people.
The example of Haiti was always a powerful one for Southerners (not Northerners, who didn't face the problem of potential extermination), who were always sensitive to being "tried on" by blacks as a test of resolve preliminary to a death-struggle. One can scold that this isn't how neighbors treat neighbors in the best Fred Rogers tradition, but the fact of the matter is that Southerners did not see black slaves as part of society at all -- hence the two-thirds rule on enumeration in the Constitution. It isn't that they didn't see them as men, because they did, very much so -- hence the danger -- but that they saw them as members of African society, the chances for friendly relations with which were slim and none if it were ever established, or, if black society were ever confounded with their own, would both redefine downward the sociopolitical status of white yeomen and poor whites by equating them with (ex-, but not very ex-) slaves, and also destroy white Southerners' own sense of having a society by confounding it with another, very different society, which then raised another social issue in the form of the biological fact of partial dominance.
All of which suited Northerners just fine, since they were in sociopolitical and economic competition with Southerners anyway, and any plague on the Southern house was, to sectionalist Northerners in the 1820's and later, a joy to behold -- and something which they tried to precipitate in 1859, by sponsoring, and then ostentatiously mourning, John Brown.
This Southern emphasis on resolve, on never giving an inch (because you might wind up being killed in your bed), is a powerful idea that had a strong hold, IMHO, on Southerners' thinking all through the 1960's. The John Brown raid, and the reaction of Northern opinion to it, planted the idea in Southerners that Northerners would be content to look on with cold eyes while a slave revolt triumphed in the South (with attendant great slaughter), and that idea has never really died away, although it has been palliated by various recent presidents' assertions that law and order must be maintained in cases of racial disturbance. In the old Southern mental model, the Watts and South L.A. riots would never have been opposed by federal authority, but rather the federal government would have stood malevolently by while the Crips and Bloods roved through white and Asian neighborhoods, killing everything that moved. I mention this to give some idea how different the terms of reference were between Southern opinion in Jim Crow days and what they were in the rest of the country.
That model of resolve in the face of implacable hostility explains, to my mind, the refusal of some Southerners to yield to appeals to courtesy, in refraining from using "unacceptable" language about blacks: those who use such language believe they are being frank and displaying intellectual integrity and resolve in the face of insidious political and social challenges to their own existence. To them, putting a euphemism in their mouths is the first step toward political correctness and the mouthful of lies that rots the brain and produces P.C. self-hatred. I think they're wrong, but given the unfolding panorama of liberal self-loathing and racial antipathy toward their own race, country, and civilization -- toward their own God -- it's not hard to fathom their reluctance.
Nevertheless, it is consistent with conservative principles (i.e., 19th-century "liberal", Jeffersonian and Lockean principles) to cultivate a certain civility in discourse, and to allow the black community to impetrate a modification of forms of address and nomenclature without going overboard and beginning to yield up personal integrity. "African-American" is a nomenclatural invention of the Left that I don't use, precisely out of suspicion of the Left's impulse to dominate others by defining terms. Nevertheless, it's possible to retire some country English without doing great violence to the language, even in the face of black hypocrisy on the subject.
It isn't necessary, however, to yield to the impulse to self-flagellate, or to flagellate one's own mother, as talmand talked about, or to talk about "stamping out" or "hating" one's own regional culture. Considering that others have been less forthcoming on their own behalf on this subject -- both Northern whites and blacks everywhere -- the demand for constant Southern self-censorship is hypocritical, and expressions of shame and remorse by Southerners for failing to measure up to these hypocritical yardsticks is idle. Better to point out that the Carolinian, for all that he misspoke and then backtracked unconvincingly, nevertheless thought to say a good thing about another, than to indulge one's own New York prejudices against Southerners, as Labyrinthos does, by pointing to his solecism as if it were the only object in view and the only topic in the room worth commenting on.
The Carolinian will do better next time with his attempts at civility, and at meeting others in the middle of the road. By then, the New Yorkers might even think about trying it themselves.
Is it?
There was no rebellion. But then, you knew that.
I'm not aware of any evidence that supports that claim.
Sure there was. But then, you knew that too.
Hartford Convention
Secession was supported by a tiny minority of the attendees and was never seriously considered. The declaration from the Hartford Convention contained no threats. And I'm not aware of anyone who proposed or advocated reunification with Great Britain.
I do not understand why some folks are still fighting the war between the states.
Having said that, on the subject of the N word, I was in the liquor store Saturday when a tall young black man walked carring a basketball, and the proprietor of the liquor store, Jamaican I believe, told the young man he couldn't be in the liquor store with a basketball. And so, the young black began verbally abusing the proprietor - calling him a N among other things.
Now I'm the only white person there, watching one black man call another black man a N !
There's no room in our world for this term. When will we move on - on both accounts, the war between the states and calling someone a N?
Yes it is.
It was actually a Spanish import -- from Africa. Or so I was told a couple of months ago, at a lecture about the failed Spanish colony at Pensacola.
The Spanish trying to set up shop in Escambia Bay got creamed by a hurricane -- a big one. Archaeologists found one of the wrecks and later identified it as the flagship, and even found a personal effect of the Spanish admiral, who was killed in the hurricane. Among the "micro" remains found in the ship were carapace sections identifiable as coming from the big brown roaches some people call "palmetto bugs" and the rest of us usually just refer to as "roaches the size of Volkswagens". These bugs, our audience was told to my surprise, are part of the Columbian Exchange. (Oh, gee, thanks, Chris. ) The speaker then speculated idly that the remains from the Urca's bilges might have belonged to the ancestors of all the millions and billions of bugs we see flitting around driveways and garden walls at night.
They're already beginning to differentiate a little bit.....while visiting Cancun in 1980, I discovered one of the big brown roaches had made it into my apartment and was hanging out on my bathroom wall, no doubt waiting for a turn in the shower. He was big enough that I gave him a name, Pablo. Any bigger and I'd have had to take him down to the motor vehicle office to get him a set of tags and register him at the front desk. But I noticed that his carapace, instead of being solid dark brown, had a distinct edging of tan all around it -- the beginnings, I suppose, of a new variety or subspecies.
I notice that it's those who surrender who insist that they weren't whipped. Yet regardless of what you want to call it they lost. They quit. They gave in, threw in the towel, surrendered, capitulated, yielded, laid down their arms, conceded defeat.
Not really. The Union is perpetual, not permanent. States come, States go.
States went.
They went home. There's a difference. Think about it real hard, and subtract all the big pile of dead people from "we wuz whipped" from the answer.
You'll get it eventually.
And when they choose armed conflict as their manner of leaving then that is called rebellion.
Because the issues and equities aren't resolved yet to everyone's satisfaction.
And in a constitutionally-bound democracy in which the People are sovereign and answer only to God Himself (not their government, or an elite class of East Coast old-moneyed "malefactors of great wealth"), not having things resolved to everyone's satisfaction is not a stable state.
Or permanent.
Actually, they didn't, and actually, no, it isn't.
But then we've discussed the constitutional requirements of rebellion. You were paying attention, weren't you?
When they 'went home' that was desertion. But they surrendered and were allowed to go home undisturbed by those that they surrendered to in a act of generosity.
Think about it real hard, and subtract all the big pile of dead people from "we wuz whipped" from the answer.
But you wuz whupped. The confederacy started losing the war almost from the first day, was at no time ever close to defeating the Union, and it just took 4 years for the corpse to hit the floor.
Well, yes they did and yes it was. They chose to initiate an armed rebellion by firing on Sumter. Rebellion is defined as "open, armed, and usually unsuccessful defiance of or resistance to an established government." The southern actions were open. They were armed. And they were certainly unsuccessful.
But then we've discussed the constitutional requirements of rebellion. You were paying attention, weren't you?
I sure was. You're just confused because I don't accept your interpretation of the Constitution. You seem to think that that is the same thing as being wrong.
I have a pretty postive bias towards Suth'ners. They seem to have some of the best preachers..
Under what theory? The troops were State troops, mustered by the State and furloughed by the State, no officer objecting to their going home. The Union had no authority over them, pretended or legal, theoretical or pracitical. The Union forces at Brownsville had just had their asses handed to them, and any serious Union effort was weeks, months away at the earliest. Both the Army of the Potomac and the Army of the Cumberland were in the Washington area and ready to go home themselves. Tell me another.
The confederacy started losing the war almost from the first day, was at no time ever close to defeating the Union, and it just took 4 years for the corpse to hit the floor.
In your own mind, Yank. You've got to stop believing your own propaganda, it'll rot your brain.
On the other hand........go on believing it. Don't let me stop you.
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