Black Rednecks & White Liberals Page 4

  When it came to inventions, only 8 percent of the patents issued in 1851 went to residents of the Southern states, whose white population was approximately one-third of the white population of the country. Even in agriculture, the main economic activity of the region, only 9 out of 62 patents for agricultural implements went to Southerners.116 The cotton gin, perhaps the most crucial invention for the antebellum South, was invented by a Northerner.

  A Southerner said to Frederick Law Olmsted:“The fact is, sir, the people here are not like you northern people; they don’t reason out everything so.”117 Olmsted himself likewise concluded from his travels in the antebellum South that Southerners were “greatly disinclined to exact and careful reasoning.”118 As late as the First World War, white soldiers from Georgia,Arkansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi scored lower on mental tests than black soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania.119 At higher levels of achievement, the contrast between the South and other regions was even more stark. A study of leading American figures in the arts and sciences in the first half of the nineteenth century found most clustered in the Northeast, while vast regions of the South—Virginia alone excepted—were without a single one. 120

  The kinds of statistical disparities found between Southern whites and Northern whites in the past are today often taken as evidence or proof of racial discrimination when such disparities are found between the black and white populations of the country as a whole, while others have taken such disparities as signs of genetic deficiencies.Yet clearly neither racial discrimination nor racial inferiority can explain similar differences between whites in the North and the South in earlier centuries.121 This should at least raise questions about such explanations when applied to blacks of a later era who inherited the culture of white Southerners.

  Sexual Activity

  Southern whites were as different from Northern whites when it came to sexual patterns as they were in other ways. Widespread casual sex was commented on by outside observers in both the American South and in those parts of Britain from which Southerners had come.122 Here again, the greatest contrast is with New England.While pregnant brides were very rare in seventeenth-century New England,123 they were more common in the Southern backcountry than anywhere else in the United States.A missionary estimated that more than nine-tenths of the backcountry women at whose weddings he officiated were already pregnant. In this, as in other respects, the “sexual customs of the southern backcountry were similar to those of northwestern England.”124 Meanwhile, the region of England from which New Englanders came “had the lowest rates of illegitimacy in England,” just as their descendants had the lowest rates of illegitimacy in the United States.125

  Women dressed more revealingly in the South and both sexes spoke more freely about sex than was common in New England. In the seventeenth centur y,“most Virginia girls found a husband by the age of seventeen,” while in Massachusetts, the average age at which women married was twenty-three.126 In that era, fornication and rape were acts severely punished in New England. Rape was a hanging offense in New England, while in the Chesapeake Bay colonies it was sometimes punished less severely than petty theft.127

  As with other North-South differences, differences in sexual behavior have often been attributed to the existence of slavery in the South—due, in this case, to the opportunities which this presented for sexual exploitation of slave women. But, again, history shows the same patterns among the same people and their ancestors in Britain, before they had ever seen a black woman. In colonial Virginia as well, the sexual exploitation of white indentured servant girls was common before the slave population had grown large enough for white servant girls to be replaced by black women.128

  Religion

  Religious denominations, practices, and churches differed as between the crackers and rednecks of the South and those of the white population in the rest of the country.As in other things, the greatest contrast was with the role of religion in New England.This did not mean that there was uniformity across the South, for the Virginia elite tended to be Anglicans and there were also Quakers in the South,for example, but most Southerners were either Baptists or Methodists. Those Northerners or foreigners who visited the South found the style and manner of religion among most white Southerners distinct—and distasteful.These visitors “viewed with contempt people who whooped and hollered, chewed and spit tobacco in church.”129 Many Southern religious gatherings were not held in churches but at outdoor “camp meetings”—a style that went back to practices of these Southerners’ ancestors in Britain.130 So too did the oratorical style of Southern preachers and the behavior of their congregations, whether in churches or outdoors.

  Frederick Law Olmsted’s description of a typical preacher in the antebellum South noted that “the speaker nearly all the time cried aloud at the utmost stretch of his voice, as if calling to some one a long distance off,” that “he was gifted with a strong imagination, and possessed of a good deal of dramatic power,” that he “had the habit of frequently repeating a phrase,” and that he exhibited “a dramatic talent” that included “leaning far over the desk, with his arms stretched forward, gesticulating violently, yelling at the highest key, and catching his breath with an effort.”131 Similar scenes were described a century earlier in Virginia and at a camp meeting in Scotland, where the preacher was “sweating, bawling, jumping and beating the desk.”132

  This melodramatic and emotional oratorical style could still be seen in twentieth-century America, not only in religious services but also in politics, both among white Southern politicians of the Jim Crow era and among black leaders of the civil rights movement in the South and community activists in the Northern ghettos.

  By contrast, religious services in colonial Massachusetts developed what has been called the “meeting and lecture” approach, where the “style of preaching was a relentless cultivation of the plain style.” These “addresses tended to be closely argued statements of great density, in which Puritans reasoned as relentlessly with their maker as they did with one another.”133 This intellectual approach to religion carried over into their daily lives:Even more than most people in their time, they searched constantly for clues to God’s purposes in the world. It was this impulse which led so many English Puritans to study nature with that extraordinary intensity which played a central part in the birth of modern science.134

  There was a dark side to this intensity as well.The vast majority of the persecutions and executions of women for witchcraft occurred in New England.135 Quakers did not have the persecuting intolerance of the Puritans but they too had plain-spoken religious meetings, also in contrast to melodramatic services among the rednecks and crackers of the South. The Anglican services were likewise less emotional and dramatic, but Anglicanism in the South was largely confined to the Tidewater region.136 Catholics too had a quieter service, though more formal than the Quakers, but there was little Catholicism in the South, where even Irish immigrants tended to become absorbed into the Protestant religions, just as the Scots tended to become absorbed into Southern fundamentalist religions.The South was a region lacking the prerequisites for maintaining an educated clergy, as required by both Presbyterians and Catholics. Anyone familiar with religious practices among black Americans today will recognize the clear imprint of the white Southern pattern.

  It was not just the Southern preachers who behaved differently from their counterparts in other parts of the country. So did the congregations. While many of those listening to hellfire-and-damnation sermons were moved to extreme emotional reactions of fear, confession, and repentance, many others took these sermons as dramatic performances or spectacles, and the young women and men often treated these religious gatherings as occasions for socializing and preludes to romantic encounters later.137 This pattern too went back to earlier centuries in Scotland where, while some at the camp meetings were “groaning, sighing and weeping” for their sins, there was usually also “a knot of young fellows and girls making assignations to go home together in the evening, or to meet in some ale-house.”138

  While the keeping of the Sabbath as a day free of worldly activities and amusements was a common practice in many parts of the United States in centuries past, that was not the practice among the rednecks and crackers of the antebellum South. Southerners “had fun on Sundays,” to the consternation of Northern observers:“One of the strangest sights to a New England man, on visiting Southern states, is the desecration of the Sabbath,” wrote a Yankee. “ In some of the cities, especially if a good number of the business men are from the North, the churches are tolerably well attended,—there being but one sermon for the day. But even here the afternoon and evening are much devoted to amusements.” Another Northerner declared that in the south “there is no Sabbath… they work, run, swear, and drink here on Sundays just as they do on any other day of the week.”139

  Many Southerners did not go to church at all, or did so intermittently, or when not distracted by other activities.140 Again, this was a pattern found among their ancestors in Britain.141 Among the reasons given by contemporaries for low church-attendance among Southerners was that they often got drunk on Saturday night and were in no condition to go to church on Sunday morning.142

  BLACK REDNECKS

  Much of the cultural pattern of Southern rednecks became the cultural heritage of Southern blacks, more so than survivals of African cultures, with which they had not been in contact for centuries. (Even in colonial times, most blacks on American soil had been born on American soil.) Moreover, such cultural traits followed blacks out of the Southern countrysides and into the urban ghettos—North and South—where many settled.The very way of talking, later to be christened “black English,” closely followed dialects brought over from those parts of
Britain from which many white Southerners came, though these speech patterns died out in Britain while surviving in the American South,143 as such speech patterns would later die out among most Southern whites and among middle-class blacks, while surviving in the poorer black ghettos around the country. For example:Where a northerner said,“I am,”“You are,”“She isn’t,”“It doesn’t,” and “I haven’t,” a Virginian even of high rank preferred to say “I be,”“You be,”“She ain’t,”“It don’t,” and “I hain’t.” …These Virginia speechways were not invented in America. They derived from a family or regional dialects that had been spoken throughout the south and west of England during the seventeenth century.144

  From these same regions of England came such words as “yaller” for “yellow,”“ax” for ask, “acrost” for “across,”“y’awl” for “you,”“bile” for “boil,”“do’ ” for “door,”“dis” for “this” and “dat” for “that.”145 Many of these usages have long since died out in England, though the word “chittlins” for hog entrails continued to be used in some localities in England, even in the twentieth century,146 as such usage remained common among black Americans. But no such words came from Africa. Nor did the holiday Kwaanza, which originated in Los Angeles.The slaves’ custom of marking their marriages by jumping over a broomstick—a custom resurrected at a posh wedding among blacks in twentieth-century New York, as a mark of racial identity147—was in fact a pagan custom in Europe in centuries past and survived for a time among Southern whites.148

  Complaints about the improvidence of whites in the South, and of their ancestors in Britain before that, were echoed in W. E. B. Du Bois’ picture of his fellow blacks in the 1890s:Probably few poor nations waste more money by thoughtless and unreasonable expenditure than the American Negro, and especially those living in large cities.Thousands of dollars are annually wasted…in amusements of various kinds, and in miscellaneous ornaments and gewgaws….The Negro has much to learn of the Jew and the Italian, as to living within his means and saving every penny from excessive and wasteful expenditures.149

  It was not, however, from Jews or Italians that blacks had absorbed their culture. Du Bois’ description of the spending habits of blacks in the 1890s was echoed by a contemporary observer, Jacob Riis, who said that the Negro “loves fine clothes and good living a good deal more than he does a bank account.”150 Similar observations have been made by many others over the years, inside and outside the black community.

  For the lower socioeconomic classes among blacks, Gunnar Myrdal’s descriptions of them near the middle of the twentieth century still bore a remarkable resemblance to descriptions of Southern whites and their regional forebears in Britain, including “less resourcefulness,” “disorganized” family life,“lax” sexual morals, and “recklessness,” with tendencies toward aggression and violence. 151 Despite a generally sympathetic approach to the study of blacks in his landmark book An American Dilemma, which has often been credited with a major influence on the advancement of civil rights, Myrdal also noted the “low standards of efficiency, reliability, ambition, and morals actually displayed by the average Negro.”152 He observed “something of the ‘devil-may-care’ attitude in the pleasure-seeking of Negroes” and a general attitude in which “life becomes cheap and crime not so reprehensible.”153

  Like other observers, Myrdal tended to attribute to slavery such aspects of black culture as “the low regard for human life,” when in fact antebellum whites had exhibited this same reckless disregard of lethal dangers and so had their ancestors in Britain. Unlike many others, however, Myrdal also recognized the influence of the Southern white culture on the culture of blacks, pointing out that “the general Southern pattern of illegality maintained this low regard for human life.”154 He also noted that “the so-called ‘Negro dialect’ is simply a variation on the ordinary Southern accent,”155 that religious “emotionalism was borrowed from and sanctioned by religious behavior among whites”156 in the South, and that the “Negro trait of audaciousness is characteristic of white Southerners too.” He quoted black scholar (and, later, statesman) Ralph Bunche:“White Southerners employ many of the defense mechanisms characteristic of the Negro.They often carry a ‘chip on the shoulder’; they indulge freely in self-commiseration, they rather typically and in real Negro fashion try to overcome a feeling of inferiority by exhibitionism, raucousness in dress, and exaggerated self-assertion.”157

  Although Dr. Bunche presented these as parallels, historically it was of course the Southern whites who first had these patterns, reflecting patterns among their ancestors in Britain. In much of the literature on black culture, however, the supposed influence of slavery has been far more sweepingly assumed and the cultural influence of white Southerners and their forebears in Britain largely ignored. Attempts to derive the black manner of speaking from slavery and its parallel among whites as an influence from black speech were answered by a Southern historian who asked, “from whence came the drawl of the people of the upper Great Plains and of the Blue Ridge, Smoky, and Cumberland Mountains, who have had little or no contact with the Negro?”158 Another cultural historian of Southerners aptly observed that “southerners white and black share the bonds of a common heritage, indeed a common tragedy, and often speak a common language, however seldom they may acknowledge it.”159

  Half a century after Myrdal, another study of racial attitudes noted “the intimidating ethnic style of many underclass black males,”160 and noted that nearly half of all murder victims in America were black, and that 94 percent of them were killed by other blacks.161 Many of these killings were due to gang members who killed for such reasons as “Cause he look at me funny,”“Cause he give me no respect,”162 and other reasons reminiscent of the touchy pride and hair-trigger violence of rednecks and crackers in an earlier era.

  The neglect and disdain of education found among antebellum white Southerners has been echoed not only in low performance levels among ghetto blacks but perhaps most dramatically in a hostility toward those black students who are conscientious about their studies, who are accused of “acting white”—a charge that can bring anything from social ostracism to outright violence.163 So much attention has been paid to questions of ability that few have looked at cultural attitudes. One of those who has is black professor and best-selling author Shelby Steele, who “sees in many of these children almost a determination not to learn,” even though, once outside the school and in their own neighborhoods,“these same children learn everything.”164 He drew on his own experiences teaching at a university:For some years I have noticed that I can walk into any of my classes on the first day of the semester, identify the black students, and be sadly confident that on the last day of the semester a disproportionate number of them will be at the bottom of the class, far behind any number of white students of equal or even lesser ability. 165

  Statistical data substantiate these impressions. Black students typically perform academically below the level of those white students with the same mental test scores,166 in contrast to Asian American students, who perform better than white students with the same test scores as themselves.167 In short, even though black students average lower test scores than either white or Asian American students, those test scores are not necessarily the sole, nor perhaps even the predominant, reason for lower black academic achievement. Indeed, it is possible that the lower test scores may be a result of cultural attitudes—and of actions or inactions over a period of years, based on those attitudes—more so than a cause of academic failures.