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
Have they really "gotten over" it? I don't think so, and I don't think their August solemnities argue that, either.
They accepted defeat, a very hard thing to do, but the occupation of Japan was very benign, and MacArthur's intendency as the first non-Japanese shogun benevolent to the point of solicitude, both for the mikado and the people of Japan, as to eclipse the equivalent administration of Reconstruction. It is true that the Japanese were more accepting of defeat, under the leadership of their emperor, than Southerners were of Yankee, and particularly Radical, Reconstruction. But they knew that they had started the war, whereas Southerners knew much more about Lincoln's intrigues and usurpations -- the illegitimacy of much of what the Republicans did, even in the administration of the North (Fehrenbach speaks demurely, in the shadow of Rushmore, of "tribunician powers"; but the scholarly reference to the roots of Roman imperial power was intended to slide gently over the heads of most of his audience, and to speak only to other historians), was acutely in the consciousness of contemporary Southerners, who never accepted the specious Republican accusation that they had been "wrong."
Reconstruction, after all, was a sectional imposition and extraconstitutional, concocted by people who had claimed as part of their cloak of legitimacy to be working for the preservation of constitutional government, whereas factional and private advantage were their palpable, real goals -- and everybody in the country with the I.Q. God gave a rabbit knew it.
"On Tony, don't tell anyone but he's the owner of a pizza parlor in Queens, near the airport - lol"
OH! I won't tell a soul.
I promise. ;o)
Please tell Tony that I am grateful for his service.
"Great thin pizza!"
Thin pizza is THE best, and my personal favorite.
Very flippant answer, but easily met.
Tell ya what, N-S baby, we'll arrange to change places. We'll arrange for a couple million Southerners to occupy the upper Midwest, with extra-special attention to "Land o' Lincoln" -- we'll burn Springfield and about half of Chicago to the ground (only the "dual-use" buildings and "enemy infrastructure" like the big buildings in downtown -- they ought to be able to see the upper floors of the Sears Tower burning all the way to Traverse City), and make a point of humiliating anyone wearing even a pair of military or police trousers. We'll rough up your womenfolk while you watch, post handbills calling them "women of the town, plying their avocations", and import an alien population to batten on you and serve as your political masters. We'll impress on you that you have lost, that you are no longer citizens or Americans but occupied meat and drink for new masters.
Then we'll get back to you and see if you're still feeling like a smartass.
Your source is the University of Texas at Austin....Austin, as in "hotbed of PC", especially near the UT campus. A lot of the people on faculty at Texas are raving liberals, as shown by author Moneyhon, whose definition you link to, with his first, strategically misdirective and inaccurate, sentence:
BLACK CODES. Black Codes were the laws passed by Southern state legislatures....
Mr. Moneyhon, if he is well-read, is probably aware that black codes were not the exclusive province of Southern legislatures, although they wrote them; they had good company in a number of Northern and Midwestern States, including your own favorite.
And if you had read those seven grafs from Fehrenbach that I pointed out to you above, you would have seen that the acceptance of "equality" for the Negro was not accepted in Northern States at all, and that restrictions on black suffrage were the rule in the upper Midwest. It was only Radical Republican opinion that engaged the concept of "equality" and unrestricted black suffrage, and then only in the South, as a regional punishment for the Southern States.
Or have you read that post yet? Q. v., supra. Et cetera.
And I'm still waiting for your answer to the other question, wise guy.
I married one.
When the abuses of that era have been cured and Northerners quit exhibiting the sort of bias this thread is about, perhaps so.
But more than attitude adjustment, we need some structural reforms to cure the Lincoln-era excesses, and Lincoln's own legislation and executive orders examined for constitutionality and, if doubtful, repealed or rescinded, or declared null and void either by the Congress or by the courts.
First, the railroad land grants have to be rescinded and the status of corporations (distorted by SCOTUS during the Gilded Age) changed back to what it was before the Civil War; a great deal of mischief has been done on both accounts, and it's time to roll those issues up.
Likewise, the 1965 Voting Rights Act needs to be rewritten or repealed, to remove the encumbrance to the States.
Furthermore, Texas vs. White needs to be taken down and the sovereignty of the States, even during secession, recognized. The public debts of the States during the Civil War, and of the Confederacy, need to be recognized and assumed by the States involved, and their enactments recognized as legitimate. West Virginia needs to be folded back into Virginia, which was subdivided without its consent by the Lincoln Administration unconstitutionally, and the matter of Nevada statehood reconsidered anew by all the States, Nevada's original admission having been a fraud.
And finally, the former Confederate States need to be allowed to decided for themselves whether they want to remain in the Union, since their secession conventions were (and need to be recognized as such) completely legal and legitimate expressions of the People's sovereign will, and the 14th Amendment needs to be passed de novo, several ratifications having been obtained illegally or even fraudulently, and some repealers having been declared (by judicial fraud) illegitimate when in fact they were fully legitimate and legally binding.
In short, it all needs to be fixed, before people can talk about "moving on," because the damage and its effects remain with us today.
you are suggesting that some sort of "plebiscite" needs to be undertaken in all southern states NOW ? in the 21st century ? You still consider the south being under some sort of "illegal occupation" ?
The point is, the exercise needs to be gone through, to re-empower the States, which are the statal establishments of the People, just as the Militia are the People, and the jury is the People, and the electorate is the People.
People = State = Militia = jury = electorate.
Lincoln's victory elevated the servant over the master by making the Government the master of the People. Since, in the machine-political system, a government becomes the plaything of a political claque, in practical terms the Civil War was a revolution that imposed the rest of the Hamiltonian/Federalist/neo-Tory vision on the United States, and crippled and fettered the People while making the neo-Tory Establishment the masters of Government, and ergo of the People. That's what all Lincoln's "mystical Union" claptrap was intended to obscure. He elevated the Union over the States/People, and perforce made something external to the People their Sovereign, i.e. their master.
The federal government is now the embodiment of Lincoln's Union -- not the People. And that Union is really the Establishment, not the collection of States that are now subservient to it and wasting away from irrelevance, as the Establishment turns to regional nostrums, non-elective megalopolitan "planning" (government) boards, and even internationalist government. It's their way of removing all decisionmaking from the People, and from any entity impinged on by the People's will, in order to concentrate all power and insulate their control of it.
We need to be driving in the opposite direction, to assert the People's control of Government, all Government, to liquidate the Lobby's influence, and to consolidate the People's possession of sovereignty.
I also am from Kentucky. I spent years in the military with people from all over the US. i lost my accent. When people would talk to me then ask me where I was from they would say that "I spoke so well" or that I was fortunate to have dropped the accent. Moving back home people thought I talked funny! I still say sir or ma'am, just like I was taught, and this is one of the things that I have noticed over the years, we southerners show respect for others, is this why we are considered 'backward?
And if I did, and if my side had started the war in the first place, then I would expect your reaction to be much the same as mine is. You know, we flattened Japan and Germany to a level never dreamed of in the south and less than 60 years later you almost never hear anyone in either country dwelling on that. But the south, which suffered less by comparison than almost any other rebellious section in any other country in recorded history, still complains and whines about the war 140 years later. Grow up.
Post war comparison would be an interesting topic to spend, oh... say.... 5 or 6 years studying to get the real answer to why Southern bitterness lingered so long after the war. Cultural submissiveness of the Japanese populace during te imperial reign had to have played a significant role in acceptance of US dominance - if what happened could indeed be called that.
In comparison to the post-WWII reconstruction, Southern occupation was seen immediately as a profiteering gig throughout the states of the Confederacy. Compare today's political relationship with Japan, 60 years after the war, to the attitudes of the 1930's, when even Northerners began to look back on the war as a means to establishing a Republican death-grip on US political power.
My source was one used by TexConfederate in the past. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Mr. Moneyhon, if he is well-read, is probably aware that black codes were not the exclusive province of Southern legislatures, although they wrote them; they had good company in a number of Northern and Midwestern States, including your own favorite.
The difference being that while the pre-war laws in the North may have made conditions for Blacks in some states almost as bad as they were for free Blacks in the south, conditions were changing. Blacks were gaining more rights post war. But the south was moving in the other direction, making their already restrictive laws even more restrictive, and trying to return slavery as much as possible.
And I'm still waiting for your answer to the other question, wise guy.
Patience is a virtue.
How do you know HE started it? You know that most of the soldiers were just poor farmers, and judging by the man's obviously poor grammar, he probably was!
This is really beneath you to throw out cheap shots. My purpose in posting the song is not that I agreed with all of it's sentiments, but to show the man's obvious pain.
I agree, read my former post.
Espinola:
Nobody here thinks the war should be refought. I personally debate, because I wish to open minds to the fact that some of what the South fought for WAS noble, and that we ALL lost some freedoms due to that despicable conflict,
I am way OVER it. This is simply debate over causes, etc.
I am a very proud veteran of the US Navy. My Ancestors have fought in every war since then, under the Stars & Stripes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The south started the war. It was his cause. He lost. Deal with it.
This is really beneath you to throw out cheap shots. My purpose in posting the song is not that I agreed with all of it's sentiments, but to show the man's obvious pain.
Oh please. Pain? What you see as pain I see as hatred for a lot of what I hold dear - the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the flag, my country. Given that you'll forgive me if I have little sympathy for someone like Major Innes Randolph, CSfreakinA.
ROTFLMAO!!!!!!! Oh my GOD! What a perfect retort! :)
Way to put it LG! :)
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