Transcription
Hey, what's up everyone? Hope you guys are having a great day today. Hope it's a happy Wednesday for you. Uh, my name is Nick Driver. You're watching "On Air with Nick Driver." And this video was sent to me by one of my friends. This is the great educator Thomas Sowell, and the name of this video is "The Origin of Redneck Culture in Britain." So let's check it out. This is Thomas Sowell. Let's get it.
"These people are creating a terrible problem in our cities. They can't or won't hold a job. They flout the law constantly and neglect their children. They drink too much, and their moral standards would shame an alley cat. For some reason or other, they absolutely refuse to accommodate themselves to any kind of decent, civilized life."
This was said in 1956 in Indianapolis, not about blacks or other minorities, but about poor whites from the South. Nor was Indianapolis unique in this respect. A 1951 survey in Detroit found that white Southerners living there were considered undesirable by 21% of those surveyed, compared to 13.3% who ranked blacks the same way. In the late 1940s, a Chicago employer said, "Frankly, I told the guard at the plant gate to tell the hillbillies that there were no openings." When poor whites from the South moved into Northern cities to work in war plants during the Second World War, occasionally a white Southerner would find that a flat or furnished room had just been rented when the landlord heard his Southern accent.
More is involved here than a mere parallel between blacks and Southern whites. What is involved is a common subculture that goes back for centuries, which has encompassed everything from ways of talking to attitudes toward education, violence, and sex, and which originated not in the South, but in those parts of the British Isles from which white Southerners came. That culture long ago died out where it originated in Britain, while surviving in the American South. Then it largely died out among both white and black Southerners, while still surviving today in the poorest and worst of the urban black ghettos.
It is not uncommon for a culture to survive longer where it is transplanted and to retain characteristics lost in its place of origin. The French spoken in Quebec and the Spanish spoken in Mexico contain words and phrases that have long since become archaic in France and Spain. Rare German dialects persisted among Germans living in the United States after those dialects had begun to die out in Germany itself. A scholar specializing in the history of the South has likewise noted among white Southerners archaic word forms, while another scholar has pointed out the continued use in that region of terms that were familiar at the time of the first Queen Elizabeth. The card game Wist is today played almost exclusively by blacks, especially low-income blacks, though in the 18th century it was played by the British upper classes and has since then evolved into Bridge.
The history of the evolution of this game is indicative of a much broader pattern of cultural evolution. In much more weighty things, Southern whites not only spoke the English language in very different ways from whites in other regions; their churches, their roads, their homes, their music, their education, their food, and their sex lives were all sharply different from those of other whites. The history of this redneck or cracker culture is more than a curiosity. It has contemporary significance because of its influence on the economic and social evolution of vast numbers of people, millions of blacks and whites, and its continuing influence on the lives and deaths of a residual population in America's black ghettos, which has still not completely escaped from that culture.
From early in American history, foreign visitors and domestic travelers alike were struck by cultural contrasts between the white population of the South and that of the rest of the country in general, and of New England in particular. In the early 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville contrasted white Southerners with white Northerners in his classic "Democracy in America," and Frederick Law Olmsted did the same later in his books about his travels to the antebellum South, notably "The Cotton Kingdom." Tocqueville set a pattern when he concluded that "almost all the differences which may be noticed between the Americans in the Southern and the Northern states have originated in slavery." Olmsted likewise attributed the differences between white Southerners and white Northerners to the existence of slavery in the South. So did widely read antebellum Southern writer Hinton Helper, who declared that "slavery and nothing but slavery has the progress and prosperity of our portion of the Union."
Just as they explained regional differences between whites by slavery, so many others in a later era would explain differences between blacks and whites nationwide by slavery. Plausible as these explanations may seem in both cases, they will not stand up under a closer scrutiny of history. It is perhaps understandable that the great, overwhelming moral curse of slavery has presented a tempting causal explanation of the peculiar subculture of Southern whites, as well as that of blacks. Yet this same subculture had existed among Southern whites and their ancestors in those parts of the British Isles from which they came long before they had ever seen a black slave.
The nature of this subculture among people who were called rednecks and crackers in Britain before they ever saw America needs to be explored before turning to the question of its current status among ghetto blacks and how developments in the larger society have affected its evolution. Immigration from Britain, like other migrations around the world, was not random in either its origins or its destinations. Most of the Britons who migrated to Colonial Massachusetts, for example, came from within a 60-mile radius of the town of Haverhill in East Anglia. The Virginia aristocracy came from different localities in southern and western England. Most of the common white people of the South came from the northern Borderlands of England, for centuries a no-man's-land between Scotland and England, as well as from the Scottish Highlands and from Ulster County, Ireland. All these fringe areas were turbulent, if not lawless, regions where none of the contending forces was able to establish full control and create a stable order. Whether called a Celtic Fringe or North Britons, these were people from outside the cultural heartland of England, as their behavior on both sides of the Atlantic showed.
Before the era of modern transportation and communication, sharp regional differences were both common and persistent. In some of the counties of colonial Virginia, from nearly three-quarters to four-fifths of the people came from northern Britain, and similar proportions were found in some of the counties of Kentucky and Tennessee, as well as in parts of both the Carolinas. Although they predominated in many parts of the South, such people also had some Northern enclaves in colonial America, notably Western Pennsylvania, where Ulster Scots settled.
What is at least equally important as where particular people settled is when they immigrated from the Borderlands, Ulster, and the Scottish Highlands. Scotland, in particular, progressed enormously in the 18th century. The level from which it began may be indicated by the fact that a visitor to late 18th-century Edinburgh found it noteworthy that its residents no longer threw sewage from their chamber pots out their windows into the street, something that passers-by had long had to be alert for to avoid being splattered. Such crude and unsanitary living had long been characteristic of earlier times when rural Scots lived in the same primitive shelters with their animals, and vermin abounded. A similar lack of concern with cleanliness was found among others in the Borderlands of Britain and among their descendants on the other side of the Atlantic.
In the antebellum South, for example, a 19th-century politician built up a political machine in the poor white districts of Mississippi by such practices as this: he did not resort to any conventional tactics of kissing dirty babies, but he pleased mothers and fathers in log cabins by taking their children upon his lap and searching for red bugs, lice, and other vermin. Back in the British Isles, the life of the Scottish people was transformed dramatically, from the masses to the elites, as they advanced from being one of the least educated to one of the most educated peoples in Europe. However, what is significant here is that much of the migration to the American South occurred before these sweeping social transformations. This timing was crucial, as Professor Grady McWhiney has pointed out in his book "Cracker Culture." Had the South been peopled by 19th-century Scots, Welshmen, and Ulstermen, the course of Southern history would doubtless have been radically different.
19th-century Scottish and Scotch-Irish immigrants did, in fact, fit quite comfortably into Northern American society. Significantly, the Irish who retained their Celtic ways did not. But only a trickle of the flood of 19th-century immigrants came into the South. The ancestors of the vast majority of Southerners arrived in America before the Anglicization of Scotland, Wales, and Ulster had advanced very far. In earlier centuries, Scotland was a poor and backward country, like Wales and Ireland, and like the turbulent Northern Borderlands of England, where the Scots and the English fought wars and committed atrocities against each other for centuries. Local feuding clans and free-booting marauders kept this region in an uproar, even when there were no military hostilities between the English and Scottish kingdoms. Ulster County had a different kind of turbulence, as the English and Scottish settlers there encountered the hostility and terrorist activities of the conquered, dispossessed, and embittered indigenous Irish population.
These were the parts of Britain from which most people migrated to the American South before the political and cultural unification of the British Isles or the standardization of the English language. The rednecks of these regions were what one social historian has called "some of the most disorderly inhabitants of a deeply disordered land." In this world of impotent laws, daily dangers, and lives that could be snuffed out at any moment, the snatching at whatever fleeting pleasures presented themselves was at least understandable. Certainly, prudence and long-range planning of one's life had no such payoff in this chaotic world as in more settled and orderly societies. Under the protection of effective laws, books, businesses, technology, and science were not the kinds of things likely to be promoted or admired in the world of the rednecks and crackers. Manliness and the forceful projection of that manliness to others, and advertising of one's willingness to fight and even to put one's life on the line, were at least plausible means of gaining whatever measure of security was possible in a lawless region and a violent time. The kinds of attitudes and cultural values produced by centuries of living under such conditions did not disappear very quickly, even when social evolution in North America slowly and almost imperceptibly created a new and different world with different objective prospects.
Pretty, pretty crazy. I'm, I might have to like watch that again, but I did take away a lot from it. So, you know, basically, according to Thomas Sowell, the hood culture that we have here in America really comes from a very small subset of the British Isles from way back, man. So, yeah, that's, that's pretty, that's pretty crazy. You know, it's, it's interesting, you know, learn as much as I can about, you know, what we're doing here in America so I'm able to have better conversations with people. Hope you guys had a blessed day. Definitely something I'm gonna think about and try to expand on maybe in the future. Thank you for sending me that video. Um, I really don't have a whole lot to comment on other than it, it is interesting to me that that hood culture came from a very small group of rednecks that lived in the British Isles. You know, that's, that's pretty, that's pretty intense, you know.
So, hey man, we're all came from something, you know. So, hope you guys have a blessed day. Take care. Let me know what you guys think in the comments. Like, subscribe, ring the bell. This is "On Air with Nick Driver." Hope you guys have a blessed day. Take care. Stay safe.