Your generalisations sicken me. You should learn what proper 'Southern Culture' is about, before you start slandering it. You are ignorant, and I hope that others see this rant for what it is.
Absolutely. I don't know why CLS has to take a perfectly reasonable position and lace it with such hyperbole and ad hominem. REASON moves people towards reasonable positions. Attacks such as this just make people dig in for a fight.
DekeOI: Don't use phrases when you don't know the meaning of them. You have previously used the ad hominem accusation inaccurately and do so again.
The fact remains that the most regressive and authoritarian tendencies in the US continuously arise from this so-called Southern Culture. It has two centuries of history proving it intolerant, bigoed and inhumane as well as unproductive.
Here is Thomas Sowell on Southern white culture. I recommend heartedly his book "Black Redneck and White Liberals". He marshals ample evidence to prove his points there.
" I came out of that Southern culture and could have been considered one of the black rednecks. More important, vast amounts of historical research by dedicated scholars have shown sharp differences between the white population of the antebellum South and the white population of the North.
While those differences have eroded over the generations, they have not completely disappeared among the poorest and least educated blacks living today in urban ghettos, North and South. Many of the differences between blacks and whites nationwide today are strikingly similar to the differences between Southern whites and Northern whites in the 19th and early 20th century.
What are those differences?
They include rates of violence, rates of sexual promiscuity, and — most explosive of all — differences in intellectual development. The biggest taboo that people are most afraid to talk about is that blacks do much worse on mental tests or in schools and colleges.
Some try to deny that there is any such difference, that it is all due to biased tests or bad schools or whatever other evasion comes to mind. The great unspoken fear is that it is racial.
In reality, antebellum Southern whites likewise lagged behind Northern whites in intellectual or educational achievement, though this could not be explained by race or racism or other factors used to explain similarly lagging intellectual and educational performances among blacks today.
As late as the First World War, whites from a number of Southern states scored lower on mental tests than blacks from some Northern states. During the antebellum era, before there were mental tests, there were other clear indications that the redneck culture did not promote intellectual development.
Southern whites did not go to school, buy books, read newspapers, patent inventions, much less supply their share of leading intellectual figures, to anywhere near the extent that their white contemporaries in the North did. Nor was this due simply to poverty.
Books were not common even in the homes of many white Southerners who could have afforded books. That was just not part of the redneck culture."
Go to Dictionary.com and search on the term. I've used it accurately according to the several sources they cite.
Here's another useful word, invective. My point is, if you want to rant and rail just to hear yourself, have at it as you've done in this essay and others. If you want to move opinion, I think you'll be better served with a different approach. It's your blog, your choice. I just think it is a shame to waste the many wonderful insights I find in your work.
Many of those who boast about traditional white southern culture can be viewed on the Jerry Springer Show when not at home in their trailers tending to their sibling spouses and offspring nieces and nephews whose first word they are taught is the n-word.
This latest dildo inquisition brought to our attention by CLS brings to mind the great liberal (sic) People's Republic of California, where in many jurisdictions it is illegal for head shops to advertise a "water pipe" as a bong, and where it is illegal for private adult porn shops to have peep show booths with doors on them or to allow more than one person per booth.
It seems to me that people are upset because you think so-called Southern culture is defective. I would think slavery, poverty, racism, the Klan, lynchings, etc ought to be enough to show a long term problem with the culture in question.
Yet these are the very kind of people who would condemn the idea that all cultures are equal and equally valid. Surely the record speaks for itself. And I can see why, those who praise such cultures, would be terrified that anyone would dare challenge it openly.
I would be curious to know what the Southern partisans attribute this history to if not to the culture. We do have slavery in the South, a willingness to go to war to defend slavery, the history of the Klan, the lynchings, the Thurmond campaign, the Wallace campaign, the creation of schools to escape desegregation, the violent sheriffs and police, the sodomy laws defended by Georgia and Texas, the dildo laws, etc. Why has there been 200 yeas of this sort of thing from just this one region of the US. Surely it goes along with the cultural analysis that Sowell did. Strongly worded or not is not the issue. Is it true?
Think of the people who were carted off to jail here. People in the South ought to be embarrassed by this sort of thing. If they aren't then that says something doesn't it?
The south is actually more of a moving target than many of its attackers will admit. Every country necessarily has its "backward" regions, just as it is not possible for every child to be above average (woe to Lake Woebegone). In Canada, Newfoundland and New Brunswick are considered backward.
The "old south" of the US has a growing hispanic population besides its large percentage of blacks. It also has a rapidly growing white population originating from outside the US south, through corporate employment, self-employed transplants, and retirees looking for less expensive, warmer climates.
The US south does have more religion, which tends to produce movements that can be embarassing--such as the anti-evolution movement in schools (worse in Kansas) and the difficulty of finding and buying dildoes (never really thought about it before now).
One thing that is simply silly, is to blame a geographic region that is in the process of rapid change, for being the exclusive center of closed-mindedness in an entire nation.
As someone who has lived from Maine to Alaska to Washington to California to Florida to Ohio to Oklahoma to Colorado, I can tell you that no one part of the country has a monopoly on closed minded bigotry.
Al Fin: I think you make some valid points. Certainly the South has been changing with the movement of Hispanics and others.
But I’ve read the statistics on fundmentalism. It is still primarily a Southern movement. Though the massive migration of poor whites into the West and the Midwest tended to bring fundamentalism to those parts of the country. Kevin Phillips outlines that well in his book American Theocracy which explores how intolerant fundamentalism was spread to the other parts of the US.
Certainly the South does not have a monopoly on closed minded bigotry. But it has a disproportionate share of it. The least fundamentalist areas of the country have much lower levels of social dysfunctionality of all types. Heavily fundamentalist states have greater poverty, greater crime, higher divorce rates, more teen pregnancies, etc., in addition to the bigotry and intolerance and tendency toward authoritarian type solutions.
By the way Kansas was not worse actually just more widely reported and it was reported because the state was move evenly divided. Fundamentalists took over the board of education and people got upset so there was lots of controvery and lots of publicity. Then they lost the school board and once again it got lots of attention. But do realize that Southern states were the pioneers of the anti-evolution laws as the Scopes trial shows. Such laws were common in the South and uncommon in the rest of the country.
Do I think everyone in the South is like this? Obviously not. But I do think these sorts of problems are more heavily concentrated there and that adherents to the values of the South are prone to intolerance and authoritarianism.
Where I lived in the Midwest there were large numbers of white Southerners living in the area. My church was mainly migrants from the South and to this day I can slip into a Southern accent picked up from being with these people day in and day out. Since I went to a Christian school most of my classmates were from the South and the church that ran the school had more than a handful of Klan members among the congregation. So for several years (through my high school and a couple of college years) I dealt with Southern fundamentalists on a daily basis. But they were just outside the South having migrated due to the poor economies of the Southern states.
A "pelvic thrust". I thought that was all settled back when Elvis hit the scene.
Jimbo: Apparently that was not setteld in in Lubbock, Texas but Lubbock has a reputation for doing things like this.
As a recent transplant to the South, I'll agree with CLS for the most part. But, I should point out that there is plenty of evidence of bigotry and racism in the so-called "blue states" as well. I should also point out that there is plenty of evidence of progress in the south.
I moved here (central Florida) from California in 2003 and I was shocked and amazed to discover that race relations here are much better than they are in the Silicon Valley! Neighborhoods (and hence, public schools) are much more integrated, interracial dating is more likely to be seen, etc. My pre-move prejudices about the South have been largely dispelled by what I've seen around me in the past four years.
And the people one encounters in public places are so polite! Let's hear it for "Southern manners!"
I have deleted and banned someonme trying to solicit sales for sex toys. Advertising products in comments sections is an attempt to steal advertising.
One light of hope is the ban on dildos in Texas was overturned in early 2008. Sex toys can once again rock the lone star state!
Note from blog owner: I edited out the link to the advertising site but kept in your comments in their entirety. Advertising is available as long as it is open and honest and booked normally.
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