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Triangle Shirt Factotum posted:Oh, well, I am from Louisiana, about as deep south as you can get and I grew up with "Black folk with pink gums are okay, but if their gums are purple, they are more like apes" and "to N*ggers have green blood" and "there was nothing wrong with slavery because black people can't take care of themselves". this depends on two factors in my opinion 1) geographic proximity to the slaveholding south 2) economic and population growth that has taken place since the civil war i grew up in rural north georgia (also a slave state and part of the rebellion for non-us folks) but slavery wasn't very common in the north georgia foothills, and practically unheard of as you went farther north into the mountains. the confederate rebellion had to deal with a huge internal cultural conflict, lowland coastal southerners vs. upland appalachian southerners. the lowlanders were very invested in slavery and perpetuating a slave state. even if you weren't one of the scarce big plantation owners, or a moderately wealthy small-time farmer who owned a couple of slaves, you were still a white person in a racially inequal society and the constant threat of a slave revolt was always on your mind, which caused you to invest in the system even if you didnt' gain from it. also, the south was huge into scientific and religiously based racism, really sort of an anything goes approach to white supremacy upland southerners were no less racist by the standards of the day, but slavery was more abstract to them. upland appalachians are and remain the poorest whites in amerca. slavery was scarce in appalachia because of the lack of money to buy slaves, as well as the lack of justification - most appalachians practiced subsistence agriculture at best, and hunted or raised livestock for a living, because the ground is uneven, rocky, and not very fertile even during the war, this cultural conflict was present - the slave state of kentucky, a mountainous state, refused to take a side and eventially joined the union because its neutrality was violated by the confederacy. the state of west virgina broke away from the slave state of virginia during the war, because largely mountainous west virginia wanted no part in the "slave owner's war". east tennessee very nearly did the same. north georgia, north alabama, east tennessee, western north carolina, all of these regions had severe problems with desertion and internal revolt - it was frankly dangerous to travel the roads in appalachia during the later part of the war, as you could easily come across the wrong group of deserters, bandits, or quasi-bandit confederate officials hunting deserters. all of these groups would shoot first and throw you in a ravine without much thought because of this, there's a variable level of white supremacy present in much of the south. places like louisiana , mississippi, south carolina, places where plantation ideology were strong tend to have more 'traditional' views on race relations. places where slavery was never as prevalent don't have that tradition to hold on to further, the south is highly rural compared to the rest of the country. while we think of the west as having wide open spaces, those spaces are largely unpopulated and the west is suprisingly urban, simply because more people are concentrated in cities and medium sized towns. conversely, the south overall has a decently high population but a lower level of average density. this means there's a lot of old small towns in the south that haven't changed much over the years., where time has passed by and if you're still living there despite the opportunity to leave, it's either because of family/social ties or fear of moving to a growing southern city and having your values judged so, the town i grew up in is both in a place where slavery wasn't really practiced, and is also younger than the war itself. roughly a third of the people who live in my hometown are black, about half are white, and the rest latino. there was some racism, but not much out in the open, because it definitely was not sanctioned or socially approved. if you wanted to be racist, you had to do so in secret. i totally buy the small town louisiana open racism, because outside of new orleans lousisiana is a bit of a backwater where old ideas can fester. racism still exists in the south, for sure, but it's increasingly seen as socially unacceptable currently i live in atlanta and i'm going to raise my kid here, because atlanta is comfortably southern and low-key but also multicultural and cosmopolitan of course all of this is more out in the open than northern or western american racism, which are their own different beasts
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Feb 1, 2017 22:25
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Grandmother of Five posted:I'm curious about how much of a language barrier regional US dialects represents, and whether any US dialects come across as wholly or largely incomprehensible to you as native American English speakers. the most extreme american accents may be difficult to understand but this is going to be almost entirely due to odd idioms and slang. in the last 40 years all american accents have been melting back together into a common accent anyway. america is a very young nation so we've had, at most, four centuries of linguistic drift probably one of the most well known and harder to understand american accents is upland appalachian https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03iwAY4KlIU also i remember a lot of non-americans struggling heavily with the african american inner city accent (which is going to vary somewhat by city) that was featured authentically on the show the wire https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8zavPW3Bus but mostly if any american wants to be understood they'll code switch and try to speak without an accent boner confessor fucked around with this message at 03:37 on Feb 8, 2017 |
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Feb 8, 2017 03:32
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Tony Montana posted:I don't want to turn this into a slinging match, but the reason I wrote the line above is because it's a window in 'What it is to live in the US'. How a society cares for it's least fortunate, those that can't get a 'job' in the traditional sense - it's it's true measure. The fact that the Donald Trumps of America are comfortable has never been the question, it's what about the people dying/starving on the street? you're right, it's ridiculous and not very easy to get healthcare. i mean, it's easy if you're middle class and have middle class expectations but i know plenty of people who go without healthcare, have chronic health problems, etc. it's one of the worst tragedies of america that we tied healthcare to employment, because that only benefits people who could already pay for it themselves while also giving extra leverage to employers
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Feb 8, 2017 03:39
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Grandmother of Five posted:Thanks again to people who have taken the time to answer questions btw. i went to public school in semi-rural georgia in the 90's, north of atlanta. the local area actually was pretty proud of its school system and dumped a ton of money into it, think corrupt small town politicians and the same three families maintaining political power for decades but instead of lining their pockets (which they did, but not excessively) they maintained their grip on power by lavishly funding education. it was and still is a very religious area, the kind of place where people don't ask you if you go to church, but which church you go to in the second year of high school at around age 15, everyone had to take one period of health class. half of the year focused on physical education so there was a lot of gym, track, weight lifting, aerobics, etc. basically how to exercise and keep your body physically fit the other half of the year was classroom education on nutrition, anatomy, disease, basic first aid, and other classroom instruction on the human body's functions. we didn't have a specific sex education focus, but when talking about the human reproductive system we also talked about sexual infections and contraceptives. sex itself wasn't specifically discussed, but i think this was because then the school district could avoid having to take an abstinence stance to please the churchgoers. so no explicit sex ed, but we discussed pretty much everything to do with sex and pregnancy in a clinical fashion without ever mentioning that people have sex. this meant there was also no discussion of sexuality or LGBT persons. i dont remember if there was an emphasis on all the different kinds of sexually transmitted diseases to scare us away from sex or if i was just focusing on them because i was nervous about sex and dating at the time
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Mar 28, 2017 04:50
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Grandmother of Five posted:I meant to ask a question about this! yeah, but part of this is just geographic sorting. almost everyone i choose to hang out with shares my left politics, we also all live in a major urban area. i have one politically right friend i've known for twenty years, he wants to move out of the city and back to the rural areas where we grew up. when i lived in my childhood hometown i knew many politically right people, as soon as i could i moved away and cut ties with that area and those people. likewise, those people are generally hostile to or scared of the city where i live, fearing crime. i felt the same way when i was a teenager visiting the city on my own for the first time, i had to live here before i knew that crime was a possibility but vastly overstated. and these are areas that are about an hours drive apart
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Apr 24, 2017 23:57
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Tiggum posted:Why is there such a huge distance between the two sides of the road? that picture is from 2001. the wideness was to provide space for a planned future highway. this is the same image more or less today, after the highway was dug out https://www.google.com/maps/place/C...35!4d-106.37921
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May 2, 2017 18:56
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