jf noonan wrote:
>
>
> What a fucking twit.
>
> P.S. Save yourself the flame -- I'm not a native Texan or
> Southerner.
>
> --
>
> Joseph Noonan
> Houston, TX
> jfn1 at msc.com
>
> haiku for struggle
>
> democracy rocks
> noisy protests in the streets
> frowns high in rich suites
>
> -Chip Berlet
A personal anecdote may illuminate how such terms as "Bubba" and "hillbilly" help support the racist culture of the U.S. (and also illustrate the way in which oppression causes racism rather than racism oppression). My mother was the daughter of a small fruit farmer in southwestern Michigan. He had migrant workers (mostly southern whites) camping out on his farm each summer. That's the general background.
Back in the '50s when I was visiting my folks my mother made the most astounding statement, and I was quite unable to get her to back off. She claimed she could tell a "southerner" by sight. They "looked different."
That is, in my mother's consciousness, southerners were a race! A perfect exemplum of the way in which racism (and the belief in the fiction of race) evolves as a "common sense" or spontaneous (i.e., ideological) way of explaining an empirical phenomenon. White southern migrant workers in southwestern Michigan, as a group, had a very specific and visible place in the social relations of that area in the 1920s and 1930s/40s. The regular inhabitants came to view them as nearly a separate species.
I suspect "Bubba," if one could trace its whole history, could be linked to that illusion on my mother's part.
Carrol