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Miscellaneous See other Miscellaneous Articles Title: Poor Whites Trashed Why conservatives are talking about struggling white people the way they usually talk about black people. Now that more whites than ever are sinking toward the bottom, the same conditions that have faced black people for decades, conservatives are talking about them the same way. “If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas,” writes Kevin Williamson for National Review, “and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy. … The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die.” His colleague David French echoed the assessment. “Simply put, Americans are killing themselves and destroying their families at an alarming rate. No one is making them do it. The economy isn’t putting a bottle in their hand.” In the past, this is how conservatives have talked about struggling blacks. If inner cities and rural black communities were poor and dysfunctional, it was because of cultural deficiencies, not broad economic problems. With more effort, went the argument, they could overcome economic isolation and social stigma. And the evidence was success among low-income white Americans who’d overcome their station. But now, more whites than ever are sinking toward the bottom, living in the same conditions that have faced black Americans for decades. And suddenly, conservatives are talking about them in the same way. We’ve seen this dynamic before. “The chief characteristic of Rag Tag and Bobtail, however, is laziness. They are about the laziest two-clogged animals that walk erect on the face of the Earth,” wrote Alabama lawyer and secessionist Daniel R. Hundley in Social Relations in Our Southern States, a widely cited volume published on the eve of the Civil War. “Rag Tag and Bobtail” is Hundley’s moniker for the poor whites of the South, whom he also calls “poor white trash.” He describes them as “working habitually in company with Negroes,” and in some sense as being black themselves. “Even their motions are slow, and their speech is a sickening drawl, worse a deal sight than the most down-eastern of all the Down-Easters while their thoughts and ideas seem likewise to creep along at a snail's pace. All they seem to care for, is, to live from hand to mouth; to get drunk, provided they can do so without having to trudge too far after their liquor,” Hundley wrote. “We do not believe the worthless ragamuffins would put themselves to much extra locomotion to get out of a shower of rain; and we know they would shiver all day with cold, with wood all around them, before they would trouble themselves to pick it up and build a fire.” Among members of the elite, class anxieties had been racialized. Hundley is just one man, but there’s no question these attitudes were common among the Southern fancy class. In one euphemism-rich passage in an 1854 treatise, Henry Hughes, a Confederate colonel and sociologist, wrote in aspirational terms of a system of American slavery in which all races participate, a sort of “I Have a Dream” speech in reverse: “Warranteeism without the ethnical qualification is that to which every society of one race must progress.” Among members of the elite, the teetering of the social structure established by slavery was understood in part as a sort of blackening of poor white people. There was something inherent in this class of white people, the thinking went, that accounted for—and justified—their lowly station and their “dysfunctional, downscale communities.” Class anxieties had been racialized. The fear among white laborers—North and South—had less to do with a flattening of the lower social strata than it did with their outright inversion. This was put to vivid political use. In the lead-up to the 1864 presidential election, the New York World—one of the most pro-Southern papers in a generally pro- Southern city—published a series of anti-Lincoln stories, editorials, and lithographs. One of them was titled “Miscegenation Ball.” Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 4.
#4. To: Ada (#0)
Williamson and National Review hate white people, plain and simple. When they talk about Detroit they do not say black people did it to themselves, and they would never in a million years say Detroit deserves to die.
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