Cultural Relativity

Cultural relativity is a thing.

Most Americans are raised within western educational norms, surrounded by a level of material wealth unimaginable to much of the world.

People in other parts of the world forced to live (or choosing to live) inside a completely different reality get labels attached to them, based on how they are perceived by westerners (us).

Negative labels might include “Third World peoples” or “slum dwellers”.

When privileged people view distant people in a romantic or positive light, we often resort to what the great Palestinian writer Edward Said called “Orientalism”.

This is when we have almost no real firsthand understanding of a culture or people, but we project our own judgments, desires and imaginings onto them.

This is why many westerners feel okay saying things like “I was born with a Gypsy spirit”.

It is why the internet is absolutely rife with memes sharing tidbits of so-called “Native American Wisdom”.

This is all grist to the mill in how we manufacture the “othering” of people, placing them into manageable boxes in relation to ourselves.

Consider the short note left on an 1860 census form in Greene County, Tennessee (see image above).

Replace the surname “Morgan” with the word “Indians”.

Chances are, 21st century “orientalism” would cause us to rebuke the census taker for his presumed superiority in calling the lifestyle of these families “savage”.

Yet if these Morgans were considered “white”, we would probably start to imagine “inbred mountain people”, and feel far less positively disposed toward them.

We have two completely different attitudes and reactions to the exact same lifestyle, based on our own “racial” and cultural expectations.

And here’s the rub.

During the 19th century, many Appalachian families and their wider kinship groups were neither wholly “white”, nor black, nor wholly “Indian”.

They were a mix of many things.

These Morgans, for example, trace back to early colonial Maryland, where a male ancestor was “given possession” of a “mulatto” girl by the courts, years after she was born “in bastardy” to an impoverished and unnamed woman of color and a “respectable” doctor who received five public lashes for his inability to keep his trousers buttoned.

These Morgans also happen to have been living smack dab in the middle of what history calls “The Nolichucky Grants”, a section of Eastern Tennessee along the Nolichucky River where an Indian trader named Jacob Brown had convinced the Cherokee to “lease” some land as early as 1772.

It is clear that the Cherokee understood such leases simply as an agreement to not wage war on settlers in this particular region.

Three years later, in 1775, a 600-strong group of colonisers and land speculators met with one faction of Cherokee at Sycamore Shoals to “upgrade” such leases into outright property transactions with a firm legal basis under Anglo-American conceptions of land ownership.

This post is too short to enter into the minute detail of such negotiations, and the differing mindsets and understanding of the parties involved.  What is relevant, is the fact that the very earliest Euro-American settlers in this region were not land speculators.  They were hunters and traders, and were often already a mixed-ethnic crew before they had even entered the region.  They then further intermarried with the indigenous peoples among whom they were trading, leading to even more deeply mixed-ethnic families.

The entire American perception and narrative surrounding “white Appalachian poverty” is based on “cultural relativism”, in which mountain people are being harshly judged by outsiders with absolutely no conception of the historical path travelled by these people.

Many families lived “up on the side of mountains”, subsistence farming with little more than a hoe, because the land of the free had no tolerance or place for “half-breeds”, “mulattos”, or “brown people”.

Or just plain poor people in general.

By the time most of these mixed folks had managed to “pass as white”, transgenerational poverty and lack of education had left many extended kinship groups in Appalachia playing a hopeless game of “catch-up” – just as the coal companies began arriving to tear the mountains down, and government damming projects covered entire communities under lake water.

#beforewewerewhite #appalachia #relativism