I spent a lot of today listening to voices on the radio saying that the outcome of a court case in New York would have no bearing on how they vote this November.

When we wonder how a person can choose to be wilfully ignorant, consider this social situation:

We get called ignorant.

Or dumb.

Or uneducated.

We get called a redneck, a rube, a “deplorable”.

Will this make us begin to change our opinions through the acquisition of new facts, more knowledge, better education?

No.

Are we happy to accept advice from people who call us such things?

Certainly not.

Why?  Because to do so would be (in our own mind) essentially admitting that we actually WERE in fact deficient in some regard.

AND WHAT IS FAR WORSE, this would also mean conceding that the people who insult us – the people we now actively dislike or hate – are in some way smarter or “better”.

No one wants to feel “lesser” or stupid.  So we dig in our heels.  We look around for allies, for anyone who agrees with us, for anyone else who hates the same people we do.  We join a tribe.

Safety in numbers and all that…

And if we’re the kind to hold a grudge, we hope and pray for the day when we can exact revenge on these people who made us feel small.

Getting revenge is easier, and far more enjoyable, than an honest look in the mirror and a long program of education and self-improvement.

Especially when so many “libs” and their ilk are holier-than-thou, insufferable, self-righteous, self-congratulatory, obnoxious assholes.

And often just as intolerant as the people they mock and criticise.

*****

How many of us, whatever our worldview, are willing to consider, let alone adopt the outlook of people we hate?  Not many, I expect.

We need to rediscover how to disagree without making people feel small or stupid.

We need to share information, rather than attempt persuasion.

This kid glove approach needn’t apply to outright racists and bigots.

The wealthy and powerful (along with certain religious leaders) have been indoctrinating the American public for centuries now.

American leaders and their marketing agents have used the cult of individualism as a way to justify rampant self-interest.

One side effect of this “Because I’m worth it” vox pop TV culture is a society where everyone thinks their opinion on EVERYTHING is a VERY IMPORTANT OPINION.  No one is willing to even consider anymore that opinions have a qualitative value, based on education, life experience, expertise.

That humility was once considered a virtue, not a sign of weakness.

There is an ocean of historical class warfare in the USA, whatever the talking heads on TV say about America being a “classless society”.  The USA simply swapped the old British hereditary class system for a class system based on money and “race”.

Don’t believe it?  Very few western countries have “tipping” as deeply embedded in their culture as the USA.  Tipping culture is a visceral reminder of the master/servant relationship, in which one party is constantly aware that the person with the most money holds the most power.  The “servant” is constantly aware that their very livelihood depends on “performance”.  Not simply performance of their job, but an attempt to read the often unspoken expectations of the customer/master and guessing what type of social performance is most likely to please them.

It is not enough to be professional and polite – one must also be an actor, an actor able to carefully calibrate one’s behavior and personality to the ego of the person holding the cash who decides whether they have “performed” to expectations.

This mini-digression into the social meaning and significance of tipping culture is about illustrating the many ways in which we reinforce superiority/inferiority on a daily basis – even when we are kind at heart, and don’t mean to do this.  We do many other things every day, believing them to be “normal”, when we are in fact simply repeating innumerable behaviors which are the legacy of social caste indoctrination.

People who come from an underclass background are acutely attuned to the ways in which others assert their “superiority”.

Unwrapping the layers of “nationalist indoctrination” and “caste indoctrination”, and helping others to see the world with different eyes, is a bit like trying to help people who have spent years in thrall to a religious cult.

If we happen to meet a family member who has joined a cult, our first conversation in ages probably shouldn’t begin with asking them “How can you be so stupid?”

Especially if we have not asked the same question of ourselves, every day.

 

 

 

 

With a ridiculous catalogue of surnames whirling around my brain due to my immersion in American ethnological history, I notice names in the news.

A month ago the West Virginian documentary film-maker Morgan Spurlock died from complications associated with cancer at the relatively young age of 53.

While Spurlock was a playwright, writer, and TV show impresario, he is probably best remembered for his 2004 documentary “Super-Size Me“.  After reading about a legal case in which two girls sued the fast food merchant McDonald’s, blaming their obesity problems on the “food” sold by the company, Spurlock decided to do an experiment, to see what would happen if he were to eat only at McDonald’s for an entire month.

His film ended-up making over 22 million bucks from a budget of around 65,000 dollars, and garnered him an Academy Award nomination.

Spurlock clearly had many personal issues and demons, claiming to have been sexually abused as a child, and his admission to past sexual misconduct on his own part effectively put an end to his career.

The surname “Spurlock” is deeply associated with the multi-ethnic people of Southern Appalachia, so when I read of his death, I of course visited his Wikipedia page to find out more about his career and background.

I was not even remotely surprised to find he described his ancestry as being mostly English and “Scots-Irish”.

What’s more, Spurlock had given interviews to newspapers and appeared in shows broadcast in the UK, discussing his “Scots-Irish” roots (see photo above).

With his ginger hair and blue eyes, why would anyone doubt him?

Regular readers will know by now that the story of a predominently “Scots-Irish” Southern Appalachia is one of my hobby horses.

Needless to say, I went to my database to check the “Scots-Irish” bona fides of his branch of the Spurlock clan.

Morgan Spurlock has no clearly demonstrable ancestry from Ulster.  None.

When I saw the surname “Porter“, I was willing to consider that ONE out of his sixteen second great-grandparents might have decended from Ulster folk – “Porter” being a name not uncommon in Scotland. But when investigating this line of Porters, we end up at a dead end in Grayson County, Virginia during the late 1700s and early 1800s, with a “James Porter” as head of a household including half a dozen “all other persons except Indians not taxed” – an old designation for free people of color.

So even if these Porters had arrived in 1700s America via Ulster (which is by no means the only likely origin for these people), within a couple of generations they were seen by a census enumerator as being something other than “white”.

This is not the only line in Spurlock’s ancestry associated with free people of color.  His earliest Barker ancestor to have migrated west out of Delaware can be found in 1820 as head of a household including nine “all other persons except Indians not taxed“.

The only other possible candidates for Ulster ancestry might be Spurlock’s “Pickens” people, but this line disappears into the fog of early 1800s Ohio Country, a war zone in which any ethnic permutation is possible.

Spurlock’s majority ancestry was far and away mostly German, with English, and very likely indigenous, African, and Portuguese/Portuguese Jewish ancestry thrown into the mix.

So why was Morgan Spurlock willing to dress-up in a short kilt in photos and claim he was “Scots-Irish”?

Was he lying?  Or was he just repeating the “received wisdom” which has been the hallmark of mainstream Appalachian “history” for well over a century now?

Does anyone even give a damn?

When we accept “the official story” without question, there is no end to the ways in which people in power will manipulate history, in order to manipulate a credulous electorate.

#beforewewerewhite #fakehistory #scotsirish #morganspurlock

 

I’ve never run a survey or metrics check for figuring-out the average age of my readership.

I do not know the average age of my podcast listeners.

So just in case a large segment of BWWW‘s audience is too young to be aware of it, when I was a child it was still illegal in some states for “white people” to marry “black people”.

Today this state of affairs might seem almost too extraordinary to believe.

But it took a court case in 1967 – Loving versus State of Virginia – to finally declare laws against “miscegenation” unconstitutional.

The very word “miscegenation” is originally derived from a hoax pamphlet published by Southern Democrats during the Civil War.

Over 160 years ago, in an eery foreshadowing of today’s “Great Replacement Theory” nonsense, white supremacist Southerners used “fake news” to try and convince Americans that the Republican Party of Lincoln was involved in a master plan to encourage and support mass “interracial marriage” until the “white race” had been supplanted by a nation of “brown people”.

Wealthy slaveholding southern elites and plantation owners lived a world away from the subsistence farming communities of Southern Appalachia.

If they had torn themselves away from their horse races and mint juleps long enough to have a look for themselves, they would have been horrified to discover that vast regions of the mountains of Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia had already been merrily producing brown babies for nearly a century.

Love is love, as they say.  This photo of a happy and affectionate couple named Sanford Owens and Artie Goins never fails to make me smile – a couple who clearly didn’t give a damn about stupid laws.

#lovingversusvirginia #beforewewerewhite #brownisbeautiful

 

Years ago, my amateur interest in genealogy began to morph into “Big Data Genealogy” as a way to investigate American history and ethnicity beyond my own immediate family.

Part of this project then became about attaching notes and mini-biographies to the people being investigated.

Were they on the wrong side of the law?

Did they experience high child mortality?

Did they live to a venerable age?

Occupation?  Ethnicity?  Victims of violence?  Perpetrators of violence?  Members of unusual religious sects?  Illnesses?  Migration paths? Disabilities?

This means that when I add a new person to my “Big Data Tree”, and run a quick check to see the various ways I am connected to them, I am often presented with an entire list of short biographical notes on a single screen – notes which bring the rich and often dark pageant of American history to life in vivid Technicolor.

 

#beforewewerewhite #commonpeople

 

Do you really like history?

Do you like it in an abstract sense, or when its hot breath is on your neck?

Is American history about “important people” chopping-down cherry trees, signing declarations, and declaring wars?

Or should history be about the very real, and much more numerous (and mostly forgotten) common people who did everyday things, courageous things, unspeakable things…?

Is history a grand sweeping narrative, or just a million fragmented sub-plots?  Is history about themes or moments?

And if you had a magic time machine, and could travel back to any moment or event, what would you want to see?

Would you be like the millions of tourists who visit the Leaning Tower of Pisa every year to get their photos taken beside it?

For no apparent reason other than to say “Yep, it’s leaning all right, and here’s a picture of me next to it, just in case you need a trusted reporter on the scene to confirm it.”

Or would you travel in the hope of discovering something hitherto completely unknown?

If you are more inclined to the latter, you’re in the right place.

 

*****

 

Every single person with deep roots in colonial era America self-identifying as “white” should consider browsing the Freedman’s Bank Records which have been digitised online.

It is one thing to speak of other people as our brothers and sisters in a figurative sense.  It is quite another to come face-to-face with a document showing that an impoverished Black woman in Reconstruction Era Memphis, Tennessee was the formerly enslaved daughter of one’s own slaveholding ancestors.

As happened to me this week.

Such insanely different paths, opportunities, dangers, hopes, successes, failures, and tribulations were experienced over the intervening decades by the differently colored descendants of the very same man.

Lost brothers and sisters.

Image: record for Mattie Franklin, 1869

#weareallrelated #beforewewerewhite