Rednecks [Reader Post]

Say,
can you, for the sake of those out here about to send kids to college, let us know the names/locations of those Real American Universities? I would love to send them my money over the Communism Indocrination Centers out there.

Janeane is using the same old liberal tactic that her demi-god and all the other Libs use when they don’t have anything like logic or reason to back their argument. They smear and belittle their opponents. If they can’t win a fight fairly, they’ll cover it up in BS, and they’ve never had a short supply of that.
Janeane likes to play the intellectual and the open minded individual, but it’s just an act because she doesn’t have a real fact to back her arguement. She’s a far more accomplished actor than a philosopher.

The only 2 Universities that don’t accept federal funds are Hillsdale College and Grove College

I first found the above post at rightbias.com / news / 102709 red . aspx last night. (remove the spaces to use the link. I fear the spam filter!)

Although I don’t post comments often, I’ve been a faithful reader here for years. No one can point to a single post that I have ever attacked anyone or any group. I strongly dislike getting involved in internet “fights”. It is with a very strong reluctance that I post this comment. However, sometimes the facts are so distorted and the premise is so twisted and disgusting, that someone should stand up for the truth. The following is an amended copy of the comments that I sent to rightbias.com.

Blacks and women were once the objects of extreme prejudges but now they can apparently enjoy their newfound public legitimacy to deride the last group in America deemed socially acceptable to demeaning ridicule and blanket prejudice; rural caucasians descended from immigrants of the disadvantaged from rural England, Scotland and Ireland. If Mr. Sowell’s bizarre and convoluted theory had even the tiniest root in reality, clear traces of his imagined historic culture would be readily apparent in their original homeland (which is admitted in the article to be false) or at least in the Appalachians, which are home to the most pure Scotch-Irish bloodline (the single other most common bloodline being rural English) existing outside of Scotland or Ireland. While the popular prejudice would have you believe differently, the Appalachians have the lowest crime rates in the country. Alcohol sales are still prohibited throughout most of the region. The Appalachians are clearly the buckle of the Bible Belt. Houses of worship per person are at the highest ratios in the nation. The Appalachians host fewer teen pregnancy centers and abortion centers of any region in America because they are un-needed there. The few manufacturing industries to move to the region experience production increases across the board. Due to poor roads, large businesses rarely locate there, so almost all employment is through small businesses. So you can toss out the “lack of entrepreneurship” charge also. Although the region leads the nation as the largest region of poverty (out stripping any inner city area, the Appalachians qualify as the nations largest ghetto by far), it leads the nation as the example of moral and work ethics. There are more higher education facilities in the Appalachians than in large regions of the West and Mid-West. Unlike in the inner cities, religious oratory does not focus on race relations and entitlement. Religious oratory instead focuses primarily upon improving the individual by encouraging each person to focus largely on the Seven Deadly Sins. The facts contradict this premise at every turn. A lively style of dance and music was almost the only point brought up in the post that could be shown in any way to mark a similarity between the culture of rural persons of Scotch, Irish, or English decent and the culture rampart in the inner cities. This was exceptionally lazy and misleading scholarship on the part of Mr. Sowell. Nancy Morgan has made plain that she transplanted her prejudges along with her person when she moved to SC. While it is possible to reference sources to back the absurd points raised by this sorry premise, one could also use prejudged and inaccurate sources to “prove” that women are completely irrational and blacks are too mentally challenged to be educated. That wouldn’t actually be true though, just as nothing about this premise is true. Candidly, I must say that I don’t know that I’ve ever found a clearer example of prejudice, poor scholarship, ignorance, and quite frankly, stupidity.

Any reasonable research effort would have found that the label cracker came from the “whip crackers” who tended to believe that blacks must still obey their every command, even after being freed. The label persisted because the attitude (decreasingly) persisted among a minority of Southerners for 100 years after the end of slavery. The label redneck was applied to white persons who had fallen through the cracks of family and community support and were forced to become sharecroppers who often had living and working conditions worse than those unfortunate enough to be fully enslaved. Redneck referenced the sun welts acquired from endless days with ones gaze directed to the earth, exposing the neck for all the daylight hours in a subtropical climate. These persons often (though not always) had slipped through those cracks precisely because they did not live up the standards of their family and community. These persons were a very small percentage of the population of the south and were NOT primarily from the region most known for the high purity of a bloodline from rural English, Scottish, and Irish sources. They generally did not reflect the common values of their community, especially not those of the Appalachian community. They were by and large from the plantation areas of the south, which had a much more diverse ancestry. Almost every European region was represented in these areas. But alongside the English, Scottish, and Irish, the Dutch, German, and the French were especially well represented in these areas. Choosing the rural English, Scottish, and Irish from this group is simply a way of using an accepted prejudice to redirect blame from the persons living the inner city culture.

“Unchallenged point”, yeah, right.

Sorry for the long post. I will not make it a habit.

OldEZ,

You make several valid points. I would, however, differ with this statement:
“My primary point is that Mr. Sowell has used an existing (untrue) prejudice to help justify the behavior of persons taking part in the inner city culture.”

Sowell’s contention, (conclusion) based on facts and other existing records, is that racism ORIGINALLY stemmed from cultural traits, as opposed to the color of skin. He does not state or extrapolate that the same holds true today.

An editor, doing his job, challenged the above facts in this article. Dr. Sowell was kind enough to reply to my request for verification with the following:

From: sowellreplies@yahoo.com
To: nancyvideo@aol.com
Sent: 10/27/2009 1:16:43 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time
Subj: Re: Townhall.com Columnist Mail for Thomas Sowell: fact check question

If the editor thinks my statements are incorrect, he has only to check my notes and specify where the statements are wrong. I doubt that he can do that– or will even try.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.