Ashcroft & Race

[Dennis Perrin/Nancy Bauer]

>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

If you wish to read a funny, nasty, 255-page polemic along these lines, I
suggest you pick up "The Redneck Manifesto" by Jim Goad. Simon & Shuster
published it, began to promote it (there was a nice bit in the Times Sunday
Mag), then when the fallout from Oklahoma City hit, along with the hysteria
over the militias, S&S dropped it quickly. Don't know if the average LBOer
will like it, but I find it very amusing. I think Goad is still locked-up
somewhere in Oregon, writing his prison novel. Tried to kill his girlfriend,
I believe -- a very redneck thang to do. 

DP