Old One Remembers History of Liberal Hypocrisy

I bow to one with superior knowledge of Southern history.

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The term Redneck was in use before the American Revolution and long before red bandanas were used by coal miner or strikers to identify the less prosperous small farm owner class in the Southern colonies who being too poor to afford slave or white indentured labor worked in the fields under the burning southern sun planting, hoeing, and harvesting their crops. Most of these backcountry farmers were fair complexioned folk of Scot,Scot-Irish, and English borderlands stock. The southern sun turned their necks a permanrent sunburn red. Many of the small farmers of the South had beguan their family’s odyssey in America as indentured laborers thus adding to the disdainful attitudes of their “betters”.
Rednecks unlike their wealthier slave owner identured servant employing largely English ancestry neighbors who were often the younger sons/daughters of English aristocracy and gentry (or descended from them) lacked what the “better folk” deemed social graces were relentlessly ridiculed by more literate elites . Worse yet in the minds of the more genteel planter class the rednecks with calloused hands performed the manual labor working the land themselves undermining the slave owner class’ defense of slavery excuse that whites couldn’t withstand the rigors of working under the broiling sun hoeing tobacco, cultivating rice, or growing hemp (for rope) or indigo.
Most of the small property owners were almost if not poor but all were proud because they owned land they toiled on bent over in the fields blistering their fair complexioned necks. As time went on they came to wear the term Rednecks as applied to them by their haughty fearful less numerous slave-ownwer indentured servant employing neighbors with pride.
One of the reasons the “betters” hated and feared the rednecks and incessantly ridiculed them was the fact that the rednecks as property owners had the right to vote, a power much feared by the outnumbered self-admiring always politically ambitious arisotcrats who believed political power was their sole prerogative and saw the redneccks as a threat to their control of politics and the social pretensions of the planter aristocracy.
As the colonies expanded westward the rednecks were the first to move west to the frontier seeking new land and where they became the dominant group often settling on the land without legal title to it. Often later arriving richer planters came west with formal land titles in hand and set about ousting the redneck squatters form the farms they had carved out in the wilderness. resisting rednecks regularly responded with their firepower and crack target shooting skills aimed at those who attempted to dislodge them from the farms they saw as the fruits of their labor.
Rednecks despite being mocked by the planer class looked down their noses at the poorer propertyless whites of the South who were labeled by all as Poor White Trash. The rednecks though humble and poor by todays standards did not consider themselves so and strived to move up the social ladder.
Following the ravages and dislocations of the Civil War in the South and the 1862 passage of the Homestead Act offering free land in the west many rednecks moved west to Texas and other frontier regions along with many of those who had been labeled White Trash. In the South itself the two groups intermingled but continued to be disdained by their betters.
During and following WW I and WW II many of those labeled rednecks moved to the North and West seeking urban work as Southern agriculture was mechanized. In their new homes they, their music, and way of life were disparaged and disdained by many especially those who inhabited eastern big cities. In the North they were seen as violent labeled hillbillies, okies, hicks, hayseeds, and trash. Hollywood discovered ridiculing rednecks made great boxoffice and stereotyping Southern rednecks was great sitcom material.

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I’m sorry, but I have to go soon. I’m definitely not running away from the conversation, I’ve just run out of time.

Nancy Morgan, you have gotten my attention. I will be purchasing Mr. Sowell’s work and corresponding. Perhaps my questions will be addressed. If not, perhaps FA will let me do a follow up report here.

At everyone – Thank you for your time and patience.

At SoR – Thanks. I was feeling like beating my head against the wall. It might have been more productive.

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Is one conclusion he drew that persons of that particular Caucasian ancestry were historically violent, lazy, willfully ignorant, drunken, arrogant, boastful sluts?

Was one of the “nesting” conclusions that he drew was that this group was a primary influence upon Black culture?

Before this goes any further, perhaps we simply have a misunderstanding of some sort.

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At Missy – thx. That got rid of some of them, but the delete option is gone from the others. Oh well. Sorry about that guys.

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Oldez,

Your points are taken. But you are incorrect when you state: “Saying that his conclusion is correct even if his starting point is wrong smacks of “Dan Ratherism” to me.”

Those are Sowells ‘conclusions’. He bases them on some pretty compelling evidence but he does not state that his conclusion is correct. The reader is left to form their own conclusions, based on, what I think, is an awful lot of solid evidence, including anecdotal evidence gleaned from a number of sources.

His essay is worth reading and IMHO, if you read it, you would most likely agree with the conclusions he drew.

BTW: No-one has disputed his facts, and I doubt anyone ever will. This man is one of the most intelligent scholars I have ever read.

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@OldEzPastTheFilter:

You can delete them yourself. Hit delete at the bottom of each post you want deleted, type in delete and what you don’t want will disappear.

BTW, thanks for the information, makes me want to visit sometime. Hubby’s family is Irish and Dutch German, before settling in SW Iowa and NW Missouri, we don’t know from where they came. After reading through your posts I’m wondering if their ancestors may have originated from that area.

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The term ‘red neck’ stems from the red bandannas worn by union mine workers who opposed ‘right to work’ miners, and the term ‘cracker’ stems from the sound of a leather whip cracking over the heads of mules being coaxed through the swampy muddy backwoods of North Florida and South Georgia.

No red skin or cracker barrel, just old-fashioned news reporter observations melding into the language and morphing into something else.

By the by, I think the union workers wore the bandannas to keep from being shot by other union members.

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Garofalo is well suited to don the cloak of characters created by someone else, but when the cloak comes off she is left with who and what she is. Nothing.

Remember Alfred Hitchcock’s words, and think of Garofalo, Penn, Clooney, and Hollywood’s other brain-dead: “Actors should be treated like cattle”.

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At Nancy Morgan;

Thank you for your reasonable response.

I stand by the statement you with which you disagreed.

Before you get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with Sowell’s contention that racism is largely “culturalism”. In fact, I whole heartedly agree. I personally would never hold a persons skin color against them but absolutely would hold a poor value system against them. I part ways with Mr. Sowell when he attempts to claim the acquisition of that culture was from a group that never had the traits of which Mr. Sowell credits them. He has furthered a prejudice and besmirched the character of an entire group of persons of common ancestry.

I don’t know about the book because I don’t own it. But to me the article seems to read that his premise rests heavily upon the acquisition of cultural traits from a particular group of poor rural whites. I strongly dispute that he has his facts correct concerning the historic values of that group. Saying that his conclusion is correct even if his starting point is wrong smacks of “Dan Ratherism” to me.

Remember what Eve said? She ORIGINALLY got the idea (picked up those cultural traits) from that vile, disgusting Satan (hillbilly rednecks that everybody knows are bad). She was trying to at least partially excuse her behavior.

It’s like saying “Johnny showed me how!”. Except that it’s much worse if Johnny was actually a good boy and never did any such thing. It’s bad enough to lay part of the blame at someone else’s feet, but much worse when the someone isn’t even guilty.

That’s where I’m coming from when I say that Sowell is attempting to justify. I’m saying he’s largely getting away with it because he choose a group that (as with Johnny) persons already have judged.

I wasn’t trying to say that he was basing it off of redneck behavior today. I was saying that if those traits were originally true of persons of the ancestry that he singled out, there would still be very clear signs of it today. After all, if those very cultural traits were such poison to poor blacks, they should have at least some similar effect on poor whites as well. I went that route because historic records about cultural morals like this are pretty well nothing but conjecture and opinion. I like hard data. I can prove every thing I said about current Appalachian residents with hard data. I don’t need opinions to do that.

I’ll put hard data against Mr. Sowell’s historic opinions any time, any where.

If in his email Mr. Sowell is attempting to say that he can prove that persons of rural English, Scottish, and Irish ancestry were historically violent, lazy, ignorant, drunken, arrogant, boastful sluts, then I say that Mr. Sowell is being quite disingenuous. I can use the same style argument to “prove” that women are quite silly and rarely capable of the reasoning power that men bear from birth. By citing data I can show that since women acquired the vote crime rates, unwed birth rates, abortion rates, the annual number of teenage suicides, the annual number of gun murders, and divorce rates have risen steadily. The data would be there and the quotes from historic “authorities” would be there. I could “prove” my premise exactly as Mr. Sowell did his. Of course we all would recognize this as an absurd premise because we know that women are not stupid and vile by nature any more than men can be. The fact that many historic figures succumbed to the prejudices of their time did not make those prejudices true. We would recognize that women acquiring the vote corresponded with other changes in the modern world that really have nothing at all to do with women acquiring the vote. I would be attempting to take advantage of historic prejudices against women and coincidental, but unrelated data points. This is why I say it was very sloppy scholarship, and that is giving Mr. Sowell the benefit of the doubt in his intentions and his character.

I will say that everything else that I have read by Mr. Sowell seemed to be of excellent quality.

Again, I apologize for the lengthy post. Again, I will try to do better in the future.

And again, Nancy Morgan, thank you for your response and patience.

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