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Immigration See other Immigration Articles Title: BLACK REDNECKS AND WHITE LIBERALS Black Rednecks and White Liberals is the winner of the June 2005 Lysander Spooner Award for Advancing the Literature of Liberty. The excerpt, below, is fron the first 30 pages from Chapter One of the book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals. Enjoy! REDNECK CULTURE Emigration from Britain, like other migrations around the world, was not random in either its origins or it destinations. Most of the Britons who migrated to colonial Massachusetts, for example, came from within a 60-mil radius of the town of Haverhill in East Anglia. The Virginia aristocracy came from different localities in southern and western England. Most of the common white people of the South came from the northern borderlands of England ”for centuries a no-man's land between Scotland and England” as well as from the Scottish highland and from Ulster County, Ireland. All these fringe areas were turbulent, if not lawless, regions, where none of the contending forces were able to establish full control and create a stable order. Whether called a "Celtic fringe" or "north Britons," these were people from outside of the cultural heartland of England, as their behavior on both sides of the Atlantic showed. Before the era of modern transportation and communication, sharp regional differences were both common and persistent. In some of the countries of colonial Virginia, from nearly three-quarters to four-fifths of the people came from northern Britain and similar proportions were found in some of the countries of Kentucky and Tennessee, as well as in parts of both the Carolinas. Although they predominated in many parts of the South, such people also had some Northern enclaves in colonial America, notably western Pennsylvania, where Ulster Scots settled. What is at least equally important as where particular people settled is when they emigrated from the borderlands, Ulster, and the Scottish Highlands. Scotland in particular progressed enormously in the eighteenth century. The level from which it began may be indicated by the fact that a visitor to the late eighteenth-century Edinburgh found it noteworthy that its residents no longer threw sewage from their chamber pots out their windows into the street ”something that passersby had long had to be alert for, to avoid being splattered. Such crude and unsanitary living had long been characteristic of earlier times, when rural Scots lived in the same primitive shelters with their animals, and vermin abounded. A similar lack of concern with cleanliness was found among others in the borderlands of Britain” and among their descendants on the other side of the Atlantic in the antebellum South. For example, a nineteenth-century politician "built up a political machine in the poor white districts of Mississippi" by such practices as this: He did not resort to any conventional tactics of kissing dirty babies, but he pleased mother sand fathers in log cabins by taking their children upon hi slap and searching for red bugs, lice, and other vermin. Back in the British Isles, the life of the Scottish people was transformed dramatically, from the masses to the elites, as they advanced from being of the least educated to one of the most educated people in Europe. However, what is significant here is that much of the migration to the American South occurred before these sweeping social transformations. This timing was crucial, as Professor Grady McWhiney has pointed out in his book Cracker Culture: ...had the South been peopled by nineteenth-century Scots, Welshmen, and Ulstermen, the course of Southern history would doubtless have been radically different. Nineteenth-century Scottish and Scotch-Irish immigrants did in fact fit quite comfortably into northern American society. (Significantly the Irish, who retained their Celtic ways, did not.) But only a trickle of the ancestors of the vast majority of Southerners arrived in America before the Anglicization of Scotland, Wales, and Ulster had advanced very far. In earlier centuries, Scotland was as poor and backward country, like Wale and Ireland ”and like the turbulent northern borderlands of England, where the Scots and the English fought wars and committed atrocities against each other for centuries. Local feuding clans and freebooting marauders kept this region in an uproar, even when there were no military hostilities between the English and Scottish kingdoms. Ulster County had a different kind of turbulence, as the English and Scottish settlers there encountered the hostility and terrorist activities of the conquered, dispossessed, and embittered indigenous Irish population. These were the parts of Britain from which most people migrated to the American South, before the political and cultural unification of the British Isles or the standardization of the English language. The rednecks of these regions were what one social historian has called "some of the most disorderly inhabitants of a deeply disordered land." In this world of impotent laws, daily dangers, and lives that could be snuffed out at any moment, the snatching at whatever fleeting pleasures presented themselves was at least understandable. Certainly prudence and long-range planning of one's life had no such pay-off in this chaotic world as in more settled and orderly societies under the protection of effective laws. Books, businesses, technology, and science were not he kinds of things likely to be promoted or admired in the world of the rednecks and crackers. Manliness and the forceful projection of that manliness to others ”an advertising of one's willingness to fight and even to put one's life on the line” were ate least plausible means of gaining whatever measure of security was possible in a lawless region and a violent time. The kinds of attitudes and cultural values produced by centuries of living under such conditions did not disappear very quickly, even when social evolution in North America slowly and almost imperceptibly created a new and different world with different objective prospects. What the rednecks or crackers brought with them across the ocean was a whole constellation of attitudes, values, and behavior patterns that might have made sense in the world in which they had lived for centuries, but which would prove to be counterproductive in the world to which they were going ”and counterproductive to the blacks who would live in their midst for centuries before emerging into freedom and migrating to the great urban centers of the United States, taking with them similar values. The cultural values and social patterns prevalent among Southern whites included an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless search fro excitement, lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery. This oratorical style carried over into the political oratory of the region in both the Jim Crow era and the civil rights era, and has continued into our own times among black politicians, preachers, and activists. Touchy pride, vanity, and boastful self- dramatization were also part of this redneck culture among people from regions of Britain "where the civilization was the least developed." They boast and lack self-restraint," Olmsted said, after observing their descendants in the American antebellum South. While Professor Grady McWhiney's Cracker Culture is perhaps the most thorough historical study of the values and behavioral patterns of white Southerners, many other scholarly studies have turned up very similar patters, even when they differed in some ways as to the causes. Professor David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed, for example, challenges the Celtic connection these put forth by Professor McWhiney, but shows many of the same cultural patterns among the same people, both in Britain and in the American South. Popular writings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have likewise described similar behavior, including the Indianapolis resident's comments on white Southern migrants to that city, which sound so much like what many have said bout ghetto blacks. None of this is meant to claim that these patterns have remained rigidly unchanged over the centuries or that these are literally no differences between whites and blacks in any aspects of this subculture. However, what is remarkable is how pervasive and how close the similarities have been. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 2.
#1. To: Ada (#0)
Blaming blax' feral behavior on whites -- what a novel idea. Why hasn't anybody thought of it before! :-)
Sowell blames it all on Scot highlanders and some English. OTOH he adores the lowland Scot. The test would be to compare American black behavior to black behavior in the rest of the world. Do American blacks behave like Haitians, for instance?
#3. To: Ada (#2)
Scot highlanders and some English in Dixie, of course, before the poor impressionable blax found solace and total liberation in yankee cities. Since that was the 18th century or earlier, a bit tough to answer your question -- except that yankee blax today are far wilder than Southern. I've spent decades living in each region, natch.
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