White Southerners

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White Southerners
Regions with significant populations
Southern United States
Languages
Southern American English, Cajun English, Louisiana French, Italian, Spanish, other languages of Europe
Religion
Christianity [1]

White Southerners, are White Americans from the Southern United States, originating from the various waves of Northwestern European immigration to the region beginning in the 17th century. A semi-uniform white Southern identity coalesced during the Reconstruction era partially to enforce white supremacism in the region. [2]

Contents

Academic John Shelton Reed argues that "Southerners' differences from the American mainstream have been similar in kind, if not degree, to those of the immigrant ethnic groups". [3] [4] Reed states that Southerners, as other ethnic groups, are marked by differences from the national norm, noting that they tend to be poorer, less educated, more rural, and specialize in job occupation. He argues that they tended to differ in cultural and political terms, and that their accents serve as an ethnic marker. [5]

Upon white Southerners Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton being elected to the U.S. presidency during the late 20th century, it symbolized generations of change from an Old South to New South society. Journalist Hodding Carter and State Department spokesperson during the Carter Administration stated: "The thing about the South is that it's finally multiple rather than singular in almost every respect." The transition from President Carter to President Clinton also mirrored the social and economic evolution of the South in the mid-to-late 20th century. [6]

Historical identity

In 1765, London philanthropist Dr. John Fothergill remarked on the cultural differences of the British American colonies southward from Maryland and those to the north, suggesting that the Southerners were marked by "idleness and extravagance". Fothergill suggested that Southerners were more similar to the people of the Caribbean than to the colonies to the north. [7] Early in United States history, the contrasting characteristics of Southern states were acknowledged in a discussion between Thomas Jefferson and François-Jean de Chastellux. Jefferson ascribed the Southerners' "unsteady", "generous", "candid" traits to their climate, while De Chastellux claimed that Southerners' "indelible character which every nation acquires at the moment of its origin" would "always be aristocratic" not only because of slavery but also "vanity and sloth". A visiting French dignitary concurred in 1810 that American customs seemed "entirely changed" over the Potomac River, and that Southern society resembled those of the Caribbean. [7]

Northern popular press and literature in this early period of US history often used a "we"-versus-"they" dichotomy when discussing Southerners, and looked upon Southern customs as backward and a threat to progress. For instance, a 1791 article in the New York Magazine warned that the spread of Southern cockfighting was tantamount to being "assaulted" by "the enemy within" and would "rob" the nation's "honor". J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur's 1782 Letters from an American Farmer declared that although slavery had not been completely abolished in the Northern states, conditions in Southern slavery was "different... in every respect", emphasizing the contrasting treatment of slaves. Crèvecœur sought to portray Southerners as stuck in the social, cultural and economic remnants of colonialism, in contrast to the Northerners whom he considered to be representative of the distinctive culture of the new nation. [8]

The War of 1812 brought increasing awareness to the differences between Northerners and Southerners, who had opposed and supported the war respectively. The Panic of 1819 and the 1820 admission of Missouri as a slave state also exacerbated the North–South divide. In 1823, New York activist Gerrit Smith commented that there was an almost "national difference of character between the people of the Northern and the people of the Southern states." Similarly, a 1822 commentary in the North American Review suggested that Southerners were "a different race of men", "highminded and vainglorious" people who lived on the plantations. [9]

Some Southern writers in the lead up to the American Civil War (1861–1865) built on the idea of a Southern nation by claiming that secession was not based on slavery but rather on "two separate nations". These writers postulated that Southerners were descended from Norman cavaliers, Huguenots, Jacobites and other supposed "Mediterranean races" linked to the Romans, while Northerners were claimed to be descended from Anglo-Saxon serfs and other Germanic immigrants who had a supposed "hereditary hatred" against the Southerners. [10] These ethnonationalist beliefs of being a "warrior race" widely disseminated among the Southern upper class, and Southerners began to use the term "Yankee" as a slur against a so-called "Yankee race" that they associated with being "calculating, money worshipping, cowardly" or even as "hordes" and "semi-barbarian". [11] Southern ideologues also used their alleged Norman ancestors to explain their attachment to the institution of slavery, as opposed to the Northerners who were denigrated as descendants of a so-called "slave race". [11] Union Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles and German-American political scientist Francis Lieber, who condemned the Southerners' belief in their supposed distinct ancestry, attributed the Civil War's outbreak to that belief. In 1866, Edward A. Pollard, author of the first history book on the Confederacy The Lost Cause, continued insisting that the South had to "assert its well-known superiority in civilization over the people of the North." [11] Southerners developed their ideas on nationalism on influences from the nationalist movements growing in Europe (such as the works of Johann Gottfried Herder and the constructed north–south divide between Germanic peoples and Italians). Southern ideologues, fearful of mass politics, sought to adopt the ethnic themes of the revolutions of 1848 while distancing themselves from the revolutionaries' radical liberal ideas. [12] The slaveholding elite encouraged Romantic "antimodern" narratives of Southern culture as a refuge of traditional community hospitality and chivalry to mobilise popular support from non-slaveholding White Southerners, promising to bring the South through a form of technological and economic progress without the perceived social ills of modern industrial societies. [12]

In the eleven-thirteen states that seceded from the United States in 1860–61 to form the Confederacy, 31% of families held at least one African American in slavery. [13]

Recent studies

According to a 2014 study, about 10% of self-identified White Southerners have African ancestry, compared to 3.5% of White Americans in general. [14] [15]

Sociologist William L. Smith argues that "regional identity and ethnic identity are often intertwined in a variety of interesting ways such that some scholars have viewed white southerners as an ethnic group". [16] In her book Southern Women, Caroline Matheny Dillman also documents a number of authors who posit that Southerners might constitute an ethnic group. She notes that the historian George Brown Tindall analyzed the persistence of the distinctiveness of Southern culture in The Ethnic Southerners (1976), "and referred to the South as a subculture, pointing out its ethnic and regional identity". The 1977 book The Ethnic Imperative, by Howard F. Stein and Robert F. Hill, "viewed Southerners as a special kind of white ethnicity". Dillman notes that these authors, and earlier work by John Shelton Reed, all refer to the earlier work of Lewis Killian, whose White Southerners, first published in 1970, introduced "the idea that Southerners can be viewed as an American ethnic group". [17] Killian does however note, that: "Whatever claims to ethnicity or minority status ardent 'Southernists' may have advanced, white southerners are not counted as such in official enumerations". [18]

Precursors to Killian include sociologist Erdman Beynon, who in 1938 made the observation that "there appears to be an emergent group consciousness among the southern white laborers", and economist Stuart Jamieson, who argued four years later in 1942 that Oklahomans, Arkansans and Texans who were living in the valleys of California were starting to take on the "appearance of a distinct 'ethnic group'". Beynon saw this group consciousness as deriving partly from the tendency of northerners to consider them as a homogeneous group, and Jamieson saw it as a response to the label "Okie". [19] More recently, historian Clyde N. Wilson has argued that "In the North and West, white Southerners were treated as and understood themselves to be a distinct ethnic group, referred to negatively as 'hillbillies' and 'Okies'". [20]

The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, published in 1980, includes a chapter on Southerners authored by John Shelton Reed, alongside chapters by other contributors on Appalachians and Yankees. Writing in the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies , social anthropologist M. G. Smith argued that the entries do not satisfactorily indicate how these groups meet the criteria of ethnicity, and so justify inclusion in the encyclopedia. [21] Historian David L. Carlton, argues that Killian, Reed and Tindall's "ethnic approach does provide a way to understand the South as part of a vast, patchwork America, the components of which have been loath to allow their particularities to be eaten away by the corrosions of a liberal-capitalist order", nonetheless notes problems with the approach. He argues that the South is home to two ethnic communities (white and black) as well as smaller, growing ethnic groups, not just one. He argues that: "Most important, though, and most troubling, is the peculiar relationship of white southerners to the nation's history." The view of the average white Southerner, Carlton argues, is that they are quintessential Americans, and their nationalism equates "America" with the South. [22]

See also

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References

  1. ↑ "Religious Landscape Study".
  2. ↑ Watts, Trent A. (2010-09-30). One Homogeneous People: Narratives of White Southern Identity, 1890–1920. Univ. of Tennessee Press. ISBN   978-1-57233-743-5.
  3. ↑ Reed, John Shelton (1982). One South: An Ethnic Approach to Regional Culture . Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. p.  78. ISBN   978-0807110386. southerners ethnic group.
  4. ↑ Reed, John Shelton (1972). The Enduring South: Subcultural Persistence in Mass Society. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. p. 11. ISBN   978-0669810837.
  5. ↑ Reed, John Shelton (1993). My Tears Spoiled My Aim, and Other Reflections on Southern Culture . Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press. p.  29. ISBN   978-0826208866. john shelton reed Southerners.
  6. ↑ Applebome, Peter (10 November 1992). "From Carter to Clinton, A South in Transition". New York Times. Retrieved 30 June 2015.
  7. 1 2 James C. Cobb (2005). Away Down South A History of Southern Identity. Oxford University Press. pp. 10–12. ISBN   9780198025016.
  8. ↑ James C. Cobb (2005). Away Down South A History of Southern Identity. Oxford University Press. pp. 13–14. ISBN   9780198025016.
  9. ↑ James C. Cobb (2005). Away Down South A History of Southern Identity. Oxford University Press. pp. 20–21. ISBN   9780198025016.
  10. ↑ De Bow's Review Volume 30 Issues 1–4. J.D.B. De Bow. 29 August 1861. pp. 48, 162, 261.
  11. 1 2 3 McPherson, James M. (2014). ""Two Irreconcilable Peoples": Ethnic Nationalism in the Confederacy". In David T. Gleeson; Simon Lewis (eds.). The Civil War as Global Conflict Transnational Meanings of the American Civil War. University of South Carolina Press. ISBN   9781611173260.
  12. 1 2 Towers, Frank (2010). "The Origins of the Antimodern South: Romantic Nationalism and the Secession Movement in the American South". In Don Harrison Doyle (ed.). Secession as an International Phenomenon From America's Civil War to Contemporary Separatist Movements. University of Georgia Press. pp. 179–180, 183–187. ISBN   9780820330082.
  13. ↑ Bonekemper III, Edward H. (2015). The Myth of the Lost Cause: Why the South Fought the Civil War and Why the North Won. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing. p. 39.
  14. ↑ Christopher Ingraham (December 22, 2014). "A lot of Southern whites are a little bit black". Washington Post .
  15. ↑ Katarzyna Bryc; Eric Y. Durand; J. Michael Macpherson; David Reich; Joanna L. Mountain (December 18, 2014). "The Genetic Ancestry of African Americans, Latinos, and European Americans across the United States". The American Journal of Human Genetics. 96 (1): 37–53. doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2014.11.010. PMC   4289685 . PMID   25529636.
  16. ↑ Smith, William L. (2009). "Southerner and Irish? Regional and Ethnic Consciousness in Savannah, Georgia". Southern Rural Sociology. 24 (1): 223–239.
  17. ↑ Dillman, Caroline Matheny (1988). "The Sparsity of Research and Publications on Southern Women: Definitional Complexities, Methodological Problems, and Other Impediments". In Dillman, Caroline Matheny (ed.). Southern Women. New York: Routledge. p.  6. ISBN   0-89116-838-9.
  18. ↑ Killian, Lewis M. (1985). White Southerners (revised ed.). Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. p.  169. ISBN   978-0870234880. White Southerners Killian.
  19. ↑ Gregory, James N. (2005). The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. pp. 166–167. ISBN   978-0807829837.
  20. ↑ Wilson, Clyde (13 August 2014). "What is a Southerner?". Abbeville Institute. Retrieved 24 June 2015.
  21. ↑ Smith, M. G. (1982). "Ethnicity and ethnic groups in America: the view from Harvard" (PDF). Ethnic and Racial Studies. 5 (1): 1–22. doi:10.1080/01419870.1982.9993357. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-07-21. Retrieved 2015-06-24.
  22. ↑ Carlton, David L. (1995). "How American is the American South?". In Griffin, Larry J.; Doyle, Don H. (eds.). The South as an American Problem. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. pp.  44–45. ISBN   978-0-8203-1752-6.

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