White Southerners

White Southerners
Southerners, Southrons
Fire Eater, publisher, and statistician, J. D. B. De Bow, was instrumental in the creation of a ethnic Southern identity in the years leading up to the American Civil War.
Total population
68,706,462
(2010 U.S. Census, White alone living in the South)[1]
Regions with significant populations
Primarily Southern United States, pockets of Southern populations found in the Midwestern and Western United States, diasporas found in Latin American countries such as Brazil and Honduras
Languages
Southern American English and General American English,[2] historically Older Southern American English
Religion
Christianity, primarily various forms of Protestantism
Related ethnic groups
Yankees, White Americans, Confederados, Confederate Hondurans, English, Scots, French, Irish, Ulster Scots, Scots-Irish, Native Americans,Five Civilized Tribes[3] African-Americans[4]

White Southerners, or simply Southerners, and historically Southrons[5] from the Southern United States, are considered an ethnic group by some historians, sociologists and journalists, although this categorization has proven controversial and other academics have argued that Southern identity does not meet the criteria for definition as an ethnicity. This confusion has led to varying forms of white Southern identity since the founding of the United States, some focusing on the region's English heritage, while others on its large number of people with Celtic ancestry, and even some on its supposed Cherokee roots.[6] It's generally agreed, however, that white Southerners inhabit an American subculture that is both separate from and woven into the popular culture and history of the United States.

After the Segregation Era brought the region to heightened national and international attention, many white Southerners began to distinguish their Southern identity from conflations of the South and the Confederate States of America. This has led to a Southern identity crisis, due in part to misleading or false equations between white Southerners, slave owners, Ku Klux Klan members, Jim Crow supporters, and Confederates as well as a disproportionately high number of portrayals in American academia and media depicting white Southerners as uniquely unintelligent, lazy, violent, and bigoted.[7] Groups like the League of the South and the Sons of Confederate Veterans still cling to the Lost Cause mythology, which arose in the years following the American Civil War and often downplays the role of slavery in Southern society and politics.[8] Other proponents of a Southern ethnic category often reference concepts like social equality, essentialism, critical pedagogy, generational poverty, cultural capital, implicit bias, internalized oppression, hegemony, social marginalization, acculturation, linguistic discrimination, and institutional prejudice as factors that distinguish Southerners from other regional groups, citing the South's turbulent history with the United States' most dominant region, the Northeast, and the long-running disparities in socioeconomics, criminal justice, healthcare, education, civil infrastructure, and enduring stereotypes of white Southerners as morally, genetically, and intellectually inferior to other social groups, especially non-Southern whites.

Most white Southerners cited British ancestry, prior to the inclusion of the American ancestry category. Confederate Major Arthur L. Rogers proposed a new altered Confederate national flag, the Blood Stained Banner, to the Confederate Senate in 1865, declaring its saltire design to represent the primary ethnic origins of the white inhabitants of the secessionist states, Scotland (Saint Andrews Cross), Ireland (Saint Patrick's Saltire), Spain (Cross of Burgundy), English Midlands (Saint Alban's Cross), and France (La Louisiane).[9]

Academic approach

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".[10][11] Reed states that Southerners, as other ethnic groups, are marked by differences from the national norm, noting that they tend to be poorer, less well educated and more rural, as well as being "occupationally specialized." He argues that they differ in cultural and political terms, and that their accents serve as an ethnic marker.[12] According to the New York Times, a survey of ethnic images conducted by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center in 1990 "found that Americans view Southerners almost like a separate ethnic group, and regard them as 'a little less intelligent, a little less hard-working' than whites in general".[13]

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".[14] 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".[15] 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".[16] 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 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".[17] 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'".[18]

The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, published in 1980, includes a chapter on Southerners authored by 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.[19] Historian David L. Carlton, who 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.[20]

Southern identity in the Antebellum South

A distinct Southern identity formed in the years following the American Revolution. Various factors contributed to the cultural and ethnic divergance from the Northern United States, namely African slavery, geography, and immigration patterns. Similar to Britain, the antebellum South was extremely class based, less so than the increasingly industrial North. Several classes of whites existed, with the Poor White being on the bottom of the social scale, the Yeomen in the middle, and the Planter, or Bourbon, class at the top.[21] The original Southern settlers were Cavaliers who arrived in Virginia to establish a colony by the name of Jamestown which would go on to be the first successful English colony in the New World and their descendants would spread out to the rest of the South building up the Southern hiearchy for years to come.

The Cavalier-Roundhead English Civil War mythology, prior to modern times, was the foundation of a Southern ethnic identity in the Antebellum South. Southern writers in the years leading up to the Civil War built a Southern identity off the belief that upper class white Southerners (the Bourbons) were descendants of the Norman conquerors (known as Anglo-Normans) and the Yankees were descendants of the Anglo-Saxons. Southern extremists such as the Fire-Eaters even proposed enslaving the "Yankee race" as they believed they were inferior to Southerners, though this proposition was unpopular with most Southerners.[21][22]

Celtic hypothesis

Many sociologists, historians, and authors have emphasized the South's Celtic heritage, primarily from Northern Ireland and Scotland, to distinguish early Southerners from the early Europeans of New England and Mid-Atlantic states, whose predominately Germanic settlers hailed from East Anglia and the Netherlands. An overwhelming Anglo-Saxon Puritan population in New England led the persecution and eventual banning of Quakers, Baptists, and other Anglican theologians in the 17th and 18th centuries, driving their migrations to other British colonies farther west and south.[23]. The "Celtic hypothesis" accounts for the large Irish-American population in the Northern states as a later migration to Northern cities in the 19th and 20th centuries following a number of factors, most notably the Great Famine and the Southern diaspora. This hypothesis suggests the Celtic settlers who populated the South in the 17th and 18th centuries had a lasting impact on Southern culture, society, and even the behavior of white Southerners.[24][25][26]

Early 20th century American journalist H.L. Mencken believed Southerners were primarily descended from the Welsh, who he considered to be religious zealots following "dogmatic Welsh Methodism". He also believed this affected the intelligence and physical characteristics of white Southerners, citing their supposed dark skin, lean bodies, and lack of intellect.[27]

Subgroups

White Southerners are primarily English-speaking, Protestant, and of English or Scots-Irish extraction, though there are several groups of White Southerners of Mexican, Italian, French, Spanish, Sephardi Jewish, and German ancestry, who have been assimilated into mainstream Southern culture while maintaining some parts of their native culture, religion, and language. Creoles and Cajuns in Louisiana were heavily assimilated by the American settlers who flooded into the newly acquired territory following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. The same occurred in Texas with the Tejanos, in Virginia with the historical German population in the Shenandoah Valley and the Moravians in North Carolina.[28]

Southern Jews

Jews have been present in what is now the Southern United States since the colonial era. Many prominent Southerners, such as the Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin, Florida Senator David Levy Yulee, sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel, as well as Georgia governor David Emanuel were Jewish. Thousands of Southern Jews fought in defense of the secessionist states in the American Civil War[29] and during the 19th century, Charleston, South Carolina was a hub of North American Jewry.

Ethnic Isolates

Melungeons, believed to be a tri-racial isolate by many historians[30], are an ethnic isolate located in the Appalachian Mountains[31], though culturally indistinguishable from their non-Melungeon neighbours, with many appearing to be visibly European-American. Multiple theories over the centuries have attempted to determine the origin of the Melungeons, including Turkish slaves, Jews fleeing the Inquisition, Aztecs, African slaves, a possible lost Chinese expedition to spread Confucianism, and the most accepted theory, that they are descended from intermarriages between free blacks and white indentured servants in the 1600s[32], though this theory has been met with scrutiny from the modern Melungeon community due to DNA evidence that suggests a myriad of origins, ranging from Native Americans to Portuguese sailors.

Southern Diaspora

White Southerners, due to economic hardship and war, have migrated all over the continental United States for decades. In the early to late 1900s, white Southerners migrated in various waves to Northern cities where they were met with discrimination from Northern whites and lived in harsh conditions, most notably in Chicago and Bakersfield, California[33].

Over the course of history there were numerous Southern ethnic enclaves, primarily in the Western United States and Latin America, the Confederados being one of the more well known groups. After the American Civil War, thousands of white Southerners, unwilling to live under Northern occupation, left the Southern United States for Mexico and Brazil, where they founded multiple colonies, though few prospered[34].

Prominent Southerners

White Southerners have contributed significantly to the culture of the United States of America, producing musicians such as Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash, authors Harper Lee and Charlaine Harris, actors Reese Witherspoon and Matthew McConaughey. White Southerners have also held prominent positions in the American government throughout history, most notably George Washington (the first President of the United States), Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, John Tyler, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Andrew Johnson Woodrow Wilson, Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton.

Racism

There is a common stereotype that modern white Southern culture is intrinsically racist. Traditionally, White Southerners have held conservative racial views, ranging from pro-segregationist views to outright support of violence against African-Americans. Though the norm in the 18th through mid 20th century, it has been argued that the Southern United States is significantly less racist compared to other regions of the United States.

Between the years 1882-1968, 4,743 lynchings took place in the United States, most of which occurred in the South and most of the victims were African-Americans, though a significant minority were white[35]. Lynching was a way to oppress the African-American minority in the Southern states and was thought necessary to protect white Southern women. Rape and murder were the most common reasons behind a lynching. Some lynchings were notably brutal and grotesque, such as the lynching of Sam Hose, a black man, whose slaughter was witnessed by 2,000 white Georgians who proceeded to slice off his ears, skin, fingers, and genitals. It has been recorded that post cards were sold of the mutilated bodies of black men who were lynched in the towns in which they were lynched and body parts were even sold as souvenirs[36].

Modern identity

Many White Southerners, following the end of the Civil War, began constructing a less racial and ethnic-based Southern identity, primarily focusing on the region's unifying culture, music, food, geography, mannerisms, and traditions as part of what became known as the New South movement.[37]

See also

References

  1. ↑ United States Census Bureau. "2010 United States Census" (PDF). Retrieved 23 June 2018.
  2. ↑ Graff, Michael. "The Death of the Southern Accent? (At Least in These Parts)". Charlotte Magazine. Retrieved 6 August 2017.
  3. ↑ "American History Scots in the American West 1790 - 1917 Scotland and the American Indians". Electric Scotland. Retrieved 6 August 2017.
  4. ↑ Gates Jr., Henry. "Exactly how 'Black' is Black America?". The Root. Retrieved 6 August 2017.
  5. ↑ Dictionary.com http://www.dictionary.com/browse/southron. Retrieved 30 April 2018. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  6. ↑ Smithers, Gregory D. "Why Do So Many Americans Think They Have Cherokee Blood?". Slate. Retrieved 30 July 2017.
  7. ↑ Rhines, Brad. "Southern Identity Crisis". Southern Glossary.
  8. ↑ Lewis, Danny. "A Controversial Museum Tries to Revive the Myth of the Confederacy's "Lost Cause"". Smithsonian. Retrieved 30 July 2017.
  9. ↑ Coski, John. "The Confederate Battle Flag". Harvard University Press. Retrieved 1 August 2017.
  10. ↑ Reed, John Shelton (1982). One South: An Ethnic Approach to Regional Culture. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. p. 78. ISBN 978-0807110386.
  11. ↑ 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.
  12. ↑ 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.
  13. ↑ Applebome, Peter (10 November 1992). "From Carter to Clinton, A South in Transition". New York Times. Retrieved 30 June 2015.
  14. ↑ Smith, William L. (2009). "Southerner and Irish? Regional and Ethnic Consciousness in Savannah, Georgia" (PDF). Southern Rural Sociology. 24 (1): 223–239.
  15. ↑ Dillman, Caroline Matheny (1988). "The Sparsity of Research and Publications on Southern Women: Definitional Complexities, Methodological Problems, and Other Impediments". In Dillman, Caroline Matheny. Southern Women (PDF). New York: Routledge. p. 6. ISBN 0-89116-838-9.
  16. ↑ Killian, Lewis M. (1985). White Southerners (revised ed.). Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. p. 169. ISBN 978-0870234880.
  17. ↑ 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.
  18. ↑ Wilson, Clyde (13 August 2014). "What is a Southerner?". Abbeville Institute. Retrieved 24 June 2015.
  19. ↑ 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.
  20. ↑ Carlton, David L. (1995). "How American is the American South?". In Griffin, Larry J.; Doyle, Don H. The South as an American Problem. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. pp. 44–45. ISBN 978-0-8203-1752-6.
  21. 1 2 "Confederate Nationalism - Essential Civil War Curriculum". Essentialcivilwarcurriculum.com. Retrieved 29 August 2017.
  22. ↑ "De Bow's Review". J.D.B. De Bow. 29 August 1861. Retrieved 29 August 2017 – via Google Books.
  23. ↑ Rogers, Horatio, 2009. Mary Dyer of Rhode Island: The Quaker Martyr That Was Hanged on Boston Archived 15 January 2016 at the Wayback Machine. pp.1–2. BiblioBazaar, LLC
  24. ↑ Nisbett, Richard; Cohen, Dov. "Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South". Westview Press. Retrieved 18 July 2017.
  25. ↑ McKay, Brett. "Manly Honor Part V: Honor in the American South". Art of Manliness. Retrieved 18 July 2017.
  26. ↑ Barber, Nigel. "Is Southern violence due to a culture of honor?". Psychology Today. Retrieved 18 July 2017.
  27. ↑ Artuso, Kathryn. "Transatlantic Renaissances: Literature of Ireland and the American South". Rowman & Littlefield. Retrieved 18 July 2017.
  28. ↑ Pasquier, Michael. "Catholic Southerners, Catholic Soldiers: White Creoles, the Civil War, and the Lost Cause in New Orleans". Retrieved 15 August 2017.
  29. ↑ Rosen, Robert. "The Free Air of Dixie". New York Times. Retrieved 30 March 2018.
  30. ↑ Gates Jr., Henry Louis. "Tracing Your Roots: Were My Ancestors Melungeon?". The Root. Retrieved 30 March 2018.
  31. ↑ "Frequently Asked Questions". Melungeon Heritage Association. Retrieved 30 March 2018.
  32. ↑ Neal, Dale. "Melungeons explore mysterious mixed-race origins". USA Today. Retrieved 30 March 2018.
  33. ↑ Berry, Chad. "Southerners". Encyclopedia of Chicago. Retrieved 30 March 2018.
  34. ↑ Dwyer, Mimi. "The Brazilian Town Where the American Confederacy Lives On". VICE News. Retrieved 30 March 2018.
  35. ↑ "History of Lynchings". naacp.org. NAACP. Retrieved 30 April 2018.
  36. ↑ Devega, Chauncey. "The Brutality of Lynchings in America". Ebony. Retrieved 30 April 2018.
  37. ↑ Thompson, Tracy. "Dixie is Dead". The Bitter Southerner. Retrieved 2 August 2017.

Further reading

  • Griffin, Larry J.; Evenson, Ranae Jo; Thompson, Ashley B. (2005). "Southerners, All?". Southern Cultures. 11 (1): 6–25. doi:10.1353/scu.2005.0005.
  • Lind, Michael (5 February 2013). "The white South's last defeat". Salon. Retrieved 24 June 2015.
  • Moltke-Hansen, David (2003). "The Rise of Southern Ethnicity". Historically Speaking. 4 (5): 36–38. doi:10.1353/hsp.2003.0034.
  • Reed, John Shelton (1980). "Southerners". In Thernstrom, Stephan; Orlov, Ann; Handlin, Oscar. Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University.
  • Tindall, George B. (1974). "Beyond the Mainstream: The Ethnic Southerners". The Journal of Southern History. 40 (1): 3–18. doi:10.2307/2206054. JSTOR 2206054.
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