Read – Before We Were White

Mixed Music for a Mixed People, or, Why Elvis Was Not a Cultural Appropriator

5 December 2024/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

The Maddox Family [left] and Wanda Jackson [right]

Genealogists use documents, oral histories (and latterly DNA) to trace family lines backward in time.

Tracing the origins of musical styles and genres is a lot more complicated.

Sound recording is only just over a century old.

This means if we want to know what music in a certain place, among a certain community, sounded like before the 1900s, we have to rely on educated guesswork.

Musicologists are pretty good at mapping the evolution of musical forms when historical printed lyrics or musical notation exists.

For example, an old Appalachian ballad such as “The Hangman’s Tree” can be traced back to the British Isles (and elsewhere in Europe) by comparing its similarities to ballads known from as early as the 1600s such as “The Maid Freed from the Gallows“.

An elderly slaveholding women named Elizabeth Shepherd [nee Yerby], born in 1778, had her throat slit by an enslaved girl named Pheriba in Alabama in 1848. Unusually for the time, the enslaved girl was not immediately hanged, but languished in jail for two years before “justice” ran its course, and she was taken to a large oak tree near the county courthouse for her public execution.

Hundreds travelled from far and wide to witness the spectacle, dressed in their Sunday best and laying-out their picnic blankets while peddlars and musicians worked the crowd.

It is said that people sang “The Hangman’s Tree” while a fiddler played, until a preacher stepped up to offer a final prayer and sermon.

The awful deed was then done.

“The Hangman’s Tree” ballad lived on in various forms, being eventually recorded under other names such as “The Gallows Pole” by artists from Odetta to Led Zeppelin.

*****

People born after the 1960s have a hard time imagining a social, cultural and political world overtly segregated <in law> by skin color.

And in terms of music – in a modern world where blues, rock, soul, jazz, and rap music have completely crossed “racial” and class lines – it is also easy to forget just how dangerous and alien these musical forms once seemed to white, “respectable” America.

In the 1930s and 1940s, “respectable” white folks in cities and towns mostly listened to popular music or crooners.

The less conservative among them listened to big band music, which sneaked its Black origins in through the back door (often quite literally).

In rural areas, there was still no such thing as “country music” per se – that name would only be coined by record companies a little later.

Rural white folks who “didn’t mix” tended to listen to ballads, “old-timey” or gospel music.

Anything which included drums or a heavy beat was not considered “white music”. Or to put it even more bluntly, the sound of drums and a rocking beat was The Devil’s Music.

Drums made folks want to dance in a way nothing like the formal square-dancing of country tents and barns.

Drums were for loose, lascivious people.

These color lines within music were consciously enforced – in the first instance, by the newly emerging commercial recording industry.

On one side, Bob Wills‘ western swing and hillbilly, on the other side, the jump blues of Junior Parker and the boogie-woogie of Meade Lux Lewis.

And things might have remained so, except for one pesky fact which has remained true throughout the centuries.

Poor and marginalized people have always had more in common with each other than with the people who keep them down.

This is why musical color divisions created by the privileged were never observed or respected by the people who got called “poor white trash” by ignorant outsiders.

And there is more…

*****

Only a certain class of so-called “white trash” was comfortable planting a foot firmly on both sides of this fence.

People with no high social reputation to protect, people who weren’t even “fully white” to begin with.

Enter the Melungeons of Southern Appalachia and other similar or related mixed-ethnic groups.

In almost every instance where later social commentators have pointed a finger, accusing “white folks” of appropriating “Black music” during the mid-20th century, we find a far more complex and nuanced situation, in which poor mixed-ethnic people “presenting as white” WERE MERELY PARTICIPATING IN THE MUSIC THEY ALREADY SHARED WITH THE BLACK COMMUNITY.

One of the earliest points where musical segregation was non-existent between the poor Black and White communities was in the genre called “the blues”.

Two or three decades later, poor Black and White (OR MIXED) communities were at it again – this time with new and exciting genres like rhythm & blues and rockabilly.

Of course, the people who first played it didn’t call it “rockabilly”.

From the 1930s to the 1950s, anything faintly reminiscent of “hillbilly” was seen as a slur.

“Hillbillies”, or people with complicated ethnic roots, just called it “good-time music”.

Only bigots and racists from outside these marginalized communities tried to police a line between “Black” and “White” music.

This cross-ethnic, cross-fertilization reached perhaps its ultimate station in commercial terms with the early Sun Records Memphis recordings of Elvis Presley.

In 2024, it is easy to forget that Elvis Presley‘s recording of “That’s Alright, Mama” was banned outright from airplay on “white” radio stations, for being “n***** music“.

BUT ELVIS WAS NOT CONSCIOUSLY SINGING “BLACK MUSIC”. HE WAS SIMPLY SINGING THE MUSIC WHICH SURROUNDED HIM GROWING-UP IN MISSISSIPPI.

Anyone doubting this should read some old interviews with B. B. King, who was always quick to defend Presley against accusations of cultural appropriation.

Many early record companies treated Black musical contemporaries of Elvis disgracefully, that is certain.

But how Presley was marketed by record companies (and his grifter of a manager) is another argument altogether, separate from his own love of the music he grew up with.

Trace a line from the Maddox Brothers and Rose in the 1930s. Folks from northern Alabama who slept on the ground as they made their way to the fruit-picking valleys of California via Oklahoma. Singing songs about scantily-clad women named Sally who let their bangs hang down low enough to protect their modesty.

On until the 1950s, with music from Carl Perkins, Lorrie Collins and The Collins Kids, Jerry Lee Lewis, Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, and the singular talent of Wanda Jackson.

A short blog offers insufficient space to give a genealogical breakdown of every “white” person involved in the genesis of R & B, rockabilly, and rock & roll.

But as one of my favorite writers on music and culture, Ted Gioia, constantly points out, if you want to understand the history of musical innovation, you have to look to the margins of society.

It is no coincidence that some of the most innovative and durable music in American history came out of places like New Orleans and Southern Appalachia – places where the marginalized of all colors made music together.

New Amsterdam and the…Melungeons?

5 December 2024/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Juan Rodriguez trading with the Lenape

In 1613, the settlers at Jamestown were finally putting the “starving time” of 1609 behind them.

A new settlement was being built at Charles City, and the first tobacco crop was going into the ground.

Emboldened to confront the Powhatan head-on, they had contrived to kidnap a native girl named Matoaka or “Pocahontas” to use as leverage in what they termed “negotiations” with local indigenous communities.

Three days’ sailing to the north, another enterprising young man was setting-up his own trading post on the island later lnown as Manhattan. Although this area had been scouted for the past three or four years by Dutch expeditions, no one had actually yet attempted to plant boots on the ground.

This small trading post would later become a favoured supply stop for early pirates and sea dogs, known by 1624 as “New Amsterdam” – the town which would pass into English hands in 1664, before being re-christened “New York”.

But in 1613, this one man with his Lenape friends and family was content to trap for beaver. Beaver skins and glands fetched an exorbitant price in Europe at the time, the pelts being made into waterproof hats, the glands being used in the perfume industry.

Although this man traded on behalf of the Dutch, and the later Dutch West India Company, he was no Dutchman himself.

This man was Juan Rodriguez of Santo Domingo, the oldest city in what we now call the Dominican Republic. At that time, the population of Santo Domingo was at least 10% Portuguese, and Juan Rodriguez was born to an African mother by a Portuguese – possibly Portuguese Jewish or Romani – father.

This largely forgotten character was the first non-Native American inhabitant of what is now New York.

Some reports suggest that he lived until at least 1640, but beyond this, he and his mixed-ethnic family’s later exploits are lost to the fog of history…

But.

By the mid-1600s, we find “free people of color” named “Driggers” living in Virginia – “Driggers” being widely thought to be an Anglicized version of “Rodriguez“.

Of course, “Rodriguez” and “Rodrigues” are not rare surnames among the Portuguese and Spanish.

But it is surely tempting to wonder what happened to the children of a man willing and able to sail over 1,500 miles from the Caribbean to New York, a man valuable to traders far and wide for his fluency in the language of the Lenape. A man unafraid of the wilderness. A man only 300 miles, or 3 days sailing, from Virginia.

Whether connected to the founder of New Amsterdam or not, descendants of “Driggers” people from the 1600s can be be found in the southeastern USA in places like the Carolinas, Florida, and Georgia, while others intermarried with mixed-ethnic “Melungeon” families such as the Perkinses of Southern Appalachia.

Claims of Portuguese ancestry made by many Melungeon families of Southern Appalachia over the decades can be viewed in a sympathetic light when we learn about people like Juan “Jan” Rodriguez.

Neither Dutchman nor Englishman, let’s salute the multi-ethnic founder of New York City.

New Amsterdam and the Melungeons of Appalachia

3 December 2024/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Juan Rodriguez trading with Lenape people

In 1613, the settlers at Jamestown were finally putting the “starving time” of 1609 behind them.

A new settlement was being built at Charles City, and the first tobacco crop was going into the ground.

Emboldened to confront the Powhatan head-on, they had contrived to kidnap a native girl named Matoaka or “Pocahontas” to use as leverage in what they termed “negotiations” with local indigenous communities.

Three days’ sailing to the north, another enterprising young man was setting-up his own trading post on the island later lnown as Manhattan. Although this area had been scouted for the past three or four years by Dutch expeditions, no one had actually yet attempted to plant boots on the ground.

This small trading post would later become a favoured supply stop for early pirates and sea dogs, known by 1624 as “New Amsterdam” – the town which would pass into English hands in 1664, before being re-christened “New York”.

But in 1613, this one man with his Lenape friends and family was content to trap for beaver. Beaver skins and glands fetched an exorbitant price in Europe at the time, the pelts being made into waterproof hats, the glands being used in the perfume industry.

Although this man traded on behalf of the Dutch, and the later Dutch West India Company, he was no Dutchman himself.

This man was Juan Rodriguez of Santo Domingo, the oldest city in what we now call the Dominican Republic. At that time, the population of Santo Domingo was at least 10% Portuguese, and Juan Rodriguez was born to an African mother by a Portuguese – possibly Portuguese Jewish or Romani – father.

This largely forgotten character was the first non-Native American inhabitant of what is now New York.

Some reports suggest that he lived until at least 1640, but beyond this, he and his mixed-ethnic family’s later exploits are lost to the fog of history…

But.

By the mid-1600s, we find “free people of color” named “Driggers” living in Virginia – “Driggers” being widely thought to be an Anglicized version of “Rodriguez”.

Of course, “Rodriguez” and “Rodrigues” are not rare surnames among the Portuguese and Spanish.

But it is surely tempting to wonder what happened to the children of a man willing and able to sail over 1,500 miles from the Caribbean to New York, a man valuable to traders far and wide for his fluency in the language of the Lenape. A man unafraid of the wilderness. A man only 300 miles, or 3 days sailing, from Virginia.

Whether connected to the founder of New Amsterdam or not, descendants of “Driggers” people from the 1600s can be be found in the southeastern USA in places like the Carolinas, Florida, and Georgia, while others intermarried with Melungeon families such as the Perkinses of Southern Appalachia.

Claims of Portuguese ancestry made by many Melungeon families of Southern Appalachia over the decades can be viewed in a sympathetic light when we learn about people like Juan “Jan” Rodriguez.

Neither Dutchman nor Englishman, let’s salute the multi-ethnic founder of New York City.

Suffragette City?

3 December 2024/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Louise Youngblood; against female suffrage

We are all truly products of our upbringing – until we choose to break the chain.

The young lady in the article shared here was from a long line of slaveholders bearing the surname “Youngblood“, who ultimately trace back to Dutch “Jongbloedt” families of New Amsterdam/New York – people who may have come to the Americas via Recife, in Brazil.

Very few Americans are aware that New York City was a ferocious stronghold of anti-“Patriot” sentiment during the 1770s.

Like many of their neighbors, some Youngbloods took the “Tory” side, appalled at the mob violence being perpetrated by many “Patriots”, who demanded that people publicly declare for a side, or face being burnt out of their homes, or suffer being publicly tarred-and-feathered and run out of various districts.

William Franklin – son of “the” Benjamin Franklin himself – was the royal governor of New Jersey, and unlike his father, a staunch Loyalist.

During and after the American War for Independence, many Loyalists/Tories removed to England, Canada, or British holdings in the Caribbean.

Others fled into Appalachia, the Deep South, or British-controlled Florida.

It is amusing in the extreme that many of the most fervent MAGA flag-wavers today, who see themselves as the torchbearers of nebulous ideals of “liberty” and “freedom”, are in fact the descendants of people who stood AGAINST the “patriot” cause.

By the time of the Civil War 80 years after the “Revolution”, many Patriots and Tories had set aside their grandparents’ differences to focus on accumulating land and riches.

Female collaborators like Ms. Youngblood were the product of a society with highly ritualized roles defined by wealth, racial caste and gender.

I found myself thinking of women like Louise Youngblood this month, when I studied the breakdown of votes cast by women for Trump/Vance – men with views on women’s rights and gender roles which would not have been out of place a century ago.

King of Communication

21 November 2024/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Bloody crown

One of the most widely spread fallacies among Americans is the belief that their “patriot” forebears saw George III of Great Britain and Ireland as a “tyrant”, and that he was thus the primary target of colonial American ire.

This is simply not true. The majority of American “patriots” or “rebels” (depending on one’s viewpoint) had no bone to pick with George III, nor did they see him as a tyrant. As British subjects, Americans were well aware that Great Britain was a constitutional monarchy, not a tyrannical dictatorship.

Legislative power was largely in the hands of the British parliament, which consisted of hereditary lords and elected representatives from various constituencies.

People in British America were not treated as a normal “constituency”, able to send elected representatives to the parliament in London.

Colonies like those in North America or Barbados were treated as separate, special types of jurisdiction, subject to governors or laws passed by the British parliament (think of Puerto Rico’s current status in relation to the USA, and you get the idea).

A large percentage of (but by no means all) American colonials were outraged that parliament could pass laws affecting Americans, while giving Americans no direct representation in said parliament.

Most American grievances had to do with money.

The British had just financed an extremely expensive war on multiple fronts on both land and sea, from Europe to the Pacific, during the 1750s. The local theater of that war which was fought in North America had essentially protected and preserved the emerging “American way of life” from French encroachment.

When the British parliament attempted to claw back some of the costs of this war through various mercantilist tariffs, taxes, and other acts, the Americans – who had become used to free-wheeling trade, widespread smuggling, and an extremely low tax burden – didn’t like it one bit.

The whole Boston Tea Party thing was about Britain trying to raise taxes by ensuring that her colonies purchased things like tea through British mercantilist channels such as the East India Company.

It cannot be stressed enough that America was a nation of smugglers and smuggling. American ships from the eastern seaboard were making fortunes through illicit trade with non-British colonial powers in the Caribbean and South America, much to the detriment of the British Exchequer.

Americans (especially smugglers) had always hated paying taxes, but they hated tax laws even more when they got no direct say in their drafting and implementation.

Add to this the Proclamation of 1763 prohibiting American colonials from settling Indian lands to the west, and we have a rebellion on our hands.

The American War for Independence was always, first and foremost, about land and money, and secondly about direct representation.

It had almost nothing whatsoever to do with anti-monarchy sentiment or any sense that George III was a brutal tyrant.

All of the freedom and liberty stuff was a coat of shiny varnish used by Enlightenment intellectuals to add extra justification for their actions.

If the newly independent USA had hated kings or monarchs that much, Alexander Hamilton wouldn’t have invited Prince Henry of Prussia to lead a British-style constitutional monarchy in America in 1786.

Prince Henry declined in the end, and a non-monarchical US Constitution was written.

Luckily for generations of later Americans, their first President, George Washington, had no interest in being a king, either.

But the offer WAS there. Hamilton wanted Washington to remain “President for Life“. John Adams wanted him to be referred to as “Your Majesty“.

A major problem did, however, survive.

Unable to envisage a truly modern nation without something like a king at its head, and almost snobbishly unwilling to place complete power in the hands of a poorly-educated electorate, the “founding fathers” created things like The Senate and Electoral College.

But most of all, and to our great and terrible detriment today, they placed huge executive power in the Office of the Presidency.

*****

Up until the emergence of Trump in US politics in 2015 or thereabouts, it was mostly unspoken but largely understood and agreed that over the course of the past 240 years or so, the USA had chosen the path of democracy, with Congress representing the will of the people, subject to a judiciary which would test all legislation against the rights and ideals laid down in the US Constitution.

Taking their cue from Washington’s choice to step down after 8 years in office, subsequent US Presidents saw their job as “presiding” over Congress, and exercising such emergency powers as deemed necessary to avoid long delays in Congress which might endanger national security.

Up until today, societal norms, traditions, and overwhelming legal precedent have been the guide to how a President should exercise such executive powers.

On 6 Nov 2024, 240 years after Prince Henry declined the offer to be king of the USA, just under 50% of American voters decided that they do, in fact, want a king.

What’s more, they want a king who, unlike George III or Prince Henry of Prussia, has no sense of “noblesse oblige“, a king who, unlike George III or Prince Henry of Prussia, WOULD be a tyrant.

In a 2020 Oval Office exchange, Trump said to a reporter “I have the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about”.

One of those powers is the authority to shut down radio, television, cable and cellphone networks, AND THE INTERNET.

According to the Brookings Institute:

“An obscure provision tucked at the back of the Communications Act (Sec.706, codified as 47 USC 606) empowers the president to ’cause the closing of any station for radio communications’ (such as broadcasting or mobile phone networks) as well as ’cause the closing of any facility or station for wire communications’ (such as telephone and internet networks). All that is necessary for the exercise of these huge powers is a ‘proclamation by the President’ of ‘national emergency’ in the case of broadcast stations and mobile phones, or the ‘interest of the national security’ for the internet or telephone networks. The statute also gives the president the power to suspend or amend FCC regulations…”

A Congressional Research Service report from 2021 concluded, “In the American governmental experience, the exercise of emergency powers has been somewhat dependent on the Chief Executive’s view of the presidential office.”

A 2010 U.S. Senate report on cybersecurity observed, “The Committee understands that Section 706 gives the President the authority to take over wire communications in the United States and, if the President so chooses, shut a network down.”

With Melania Trump relinquishing her place in the limelight lately, Elon Musk appears to have stepped into the First Lady role.

I invite everyone reading this to consider the possibility that Trump or Vance might invoke Section 706 of the Communications Act.

What does every authoritarian desire most of all? Control of communications.

What does First Lady-in-waiting Musk have that any authoritarian would kill for?

A fully-operational satellite-based internet and communications system called Starlink.

I hope for all our sakes I’m just an old paranoid fool.

Old Mix Americans, cont’d (or why the mixed-ethnic history of many Americans really matters)

19 November 2024/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Mail-in voter registration form [Alabama]

Someone left a comment on my recent post about Old Mix Americans which I found very thought-provoking.

It occurred to me that I should address some of the points raised.

Sorry for the lengthy explication.

Words sometimes seem to spill out in spite of any attempt at brevity.

███████

“White today only means light skinned…people should just stop fueling this shit, we’re in 2024.”

>>>>>>>>>>

If it is true that “white” only means “light-skinned”, why do so many government forms still insist on asking us to self-identify as “white” or “black”?

Questions about our skin color seem to be subliminally reinforcing the idea that “white” is about more than a mere lack of skin pigmentation.

It seems as if a “white” self-description is really trying to act as a proxy for ethnicity.

If “white” is really seen as nothing more than a skin color nowadays, why on earth would the government even need to ask us if we are “light-skinned”?

One can only assume that government agencies are in fact using skin colors as a sort of shorthand for “European-American” or “African-American” – yet even those terms say almost nothing about real ethnicity.

Even if we were to break down “European-American” into historical points of origin – Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Czechia, et al – we would still not be dealing with ethnicities. We would be dealing with NATIONALITIES, which is not the same thing at all. Modern nation-states everywhere encompass a myriad of ethnicities.

And almost no modern nation state has seen the level of inter-ethnic mixing seen in the USA.

Those whose colonizer ancestors arrived in North America earliest (say, pre-American Revolution) are the ones most likely to have ancestors from every continent, including Africa. To be American, especially “Old Mix American“, is to be the antithesis of ethnic “purity”.

Almost the only thing of value which can be gleaned from questions about our skin color is a broad-population-level comparative analysis of things like income, education, crime statistics, home ownership, life expectancy, and health between groups SEEN as “white” and groups SEEN as “black”.

Such an analysis can offer insights into the many ways in which being SEEN as a certain color might affect transgenerational poverty, social mobility and dysfunction, and general trends in life outcomes.

It is an unfortunate fact that 400 years of a color-based caste system has made it virtually impossible for many Americans to even conceive of the idea that there are no biological boundaries between “races”, let alone embrace the concept that “races” simply do not exist.

My work on the Before We Were White blog and podcast is intended precisely to demonstrate that almost all Americans are profoundly mixed and interrelated, and to even attempt to speak of distinct, separate “races” is ludicrous, absurd, profoundly unscientific, and most of all, baseless in the face of real world evidence.

Is there such a thing as “experiencing Blackness”? Damn right there is. But it’s still the result of a human construction.

We could just as easily say that people with red hair and freckles are a separate “race”…

Girls in Afghanistan “experience Islam”, even if that form of Islam is wholly constructed in the minds of men.

My goal here is most certainly NOT to create new divisive micro-ethnicities.

“Old Mix American” is intended as a broad descriptor CROSSING traditional “racial” boundaries.

It is meant to bring people together, not push them farther apart.

███████

“Basing ethnic identity on mutual DNA rather than mutual culture values and tradition is a near exclusive American mentality.”

>>>>>>>>>>

This is the crux of a BIG problem. Throughout human history, all people have tended to be placed into or chosen to self-assemble into groups.

Hunter gatherers are often extended kinship groups.

Urban dwellers often identify mostly with their home cities. Think ancient Athens, medieval Venice, modern New York…

People are segregated or self-segregate according to class or wealth. Think of the British House of Lords versus House of Commons, or gated communities versus ghettos…

People are also defined by or self-identify themselves by their religion or ideology.

People are often described in terms of their citizenship, loyalty, or allegiance to tribal leaders, monarchs, political leaders, or nations.

People have been, and often still are, segregated or self-segregated by appearance, ancestry, ethnicity, or caste.

***

Which mutual cultural values and traditions are US citizens supposed to coalesce around?

Which US cultural values and traditions supercede all of the above-named categories of identity?

Justice? In a country with a compromised and partisan court system, where only the people with the money to “lawyer-up” mightily have the slightest chance of justice?

Freedom? How can a country in which 78% of its people live paycheck to paycheck claim to be “the land of the free”? Where is freedom when a single health emergency can bankrupt a family for life?

Opportunity? How can a young person save up to buy a house when they can barely afford rent and groceries? When 1% of the population controls 90% of the wealth?

I ask again. Which mutual cultural values and traditions are US citizens supposed to coalesce around?

Celebrity culture? Consumer culture? Military culture? Religious culture? The NFL and NBA? Tacos and cheeseburgers?

This lack of a genuine and deeply shared pan-USA culture, this sense of untetheredness, of “something being no longer quite right”, is exactly what gave rise to the MAGA cult.

MAGA cheerleaders point to a semi-imaginary time during the mid-20th century, in which everything still seemed to make sense to their own community.

Men had good-paying jobs. Mothers stayed at home cooking, cleaning, and minding the kids. People went to church and Sunday School. Fathers took their boys fishing. Girls dreamed of who they might marry one day.

But people were very, very good at not noticing certain things back then.

Factories poisoning rivers. US-backed coups in Iran. Domestic violence against women and children. US-backed dictators in Latin America. Housewives on Valium. Backstreet abortions. Lynchings.

The American hallucination of itself was represented on TV by almost surreal saccharine dross like “Leave it to Beaver“, “The Andy Griffith Show“, “Happy Days“, and “The Love Boat“.

And most of all, the people who were doing all right within the system pretended not to notice that back in this “Golden Age” when America was supposedly “great”, it was only great for white folks.

Mexican fruit pickers and African-American school janitors were just kind of “there”, a sort of human wallpaper, noticed only in passing, somehow barely audible, barely visible.

Unless they were singing. Or God forbid, protesting.

***

Many people in the USA still have a particular historical and ongoing problem in which they conflate “color” or appearance with specific cultural values or behaviors – even ascribing higher levels of innate intelligence or greater capabilities to certain “races”.

Many Americans genuinely believe that people of a certain color have a greater propensity for violence and crime. Not because of 400 years of dehumanization and disadvantage, but because of something IN THEM.

As a writer, I have a particular interest in sharing research which lays bare the multi-ethnic ancestry of those Americans who persist in repeating these racist tropes, using racist dog whistles, or advocating for “white supremacy” and “New Eugenics”.

IT IS OUTRAGEOUS THAT RACISM, BOTH CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS, CAN EXIST IN A COUNTRY WHERE THE VAST MAJORITY OF PEOPLE ARE OF MIXED ANCESTRY – BLACK, WHITE, AND BROWN.

As someone raised mostly in rural and small town America who would have been seen by many as “white trash”, as someone who was bussed into Black schools during the 70s, as someone who joined the army on his 17th birthday and sat in a 5 ton truck parked up in the snow on dark nights in Germany along the Iron Curtain talking to Black soldiers, I am in a position to suggest that social dysfunction is caused by many things, both recent and historical.

But mostly, it is caused by the greed, racism, and bigotry of those in power who sow division among the underclasses.

Old Mix Americans

18 November 2024/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Tiffany Trump (the less well-known “other” child), whose ancestry includes “non-white” Locklears of the Lumbee people

An Old Mix American is a person with many of their direct ancestral lines already present in the Americas by the 1600s.

Old Mix Americans are characterised by having multiple ancestral lines derived from non-European population groups – people who would have usually been considered “non-white” or “persons of color” under the British colonial (and later US American) racial caste system.

It is important to note that many of these “persons of color” also arrived from Europe. Many European Romani and Jewish people, for example, were often perceived by the dominant “white” caste as “non-white”.

The majority of Old Mix Americans are now found scattered throughout the USA and often choose to present as “white”, following decades of intermarriage with European-Americans.

Many population groups ancestral to Old Mix Americans still survive in rural places where the European-American influence has been less pronounced, and each community or extended kinship group has its own unique ethnic history.

The largest and most well-known Old Mix American groups include the Lumbee of North Carolina, the Redbones of Louisiana and Texas, and the Melungeons of Southern Appalachia.

Often described as “tri-racial isolate” communities under American “race” classifications (which traditionally only allowed for “white”, “black”, and “indigenous” categories), the ancestry of these groups can include people from a myriad of backgrounds – indigenous North American, indigenous South American, indigenous Caribbean, North African, sub-Saharan African, Jewish, Malagasi, Sami, Near Eastern, Middle Eastern, Romani, East Indian, and Asian.

Making America Great Again [“be fruitful and multiply…]

17 November 2024/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Back when America was great [North Carolina, 1933]

“I think the rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and most evil thing that the left has done in this country.”

“Why have we let the Democrat party become controlled by people who don’t have children, and why is this just a normal fact of American life that the leaders of our country should be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring, via their own children and grandchildren?

“These children are the future of this country and yet the parents who have them actually have no advantage in our democratic process,” Vance said. “They have a smaller voice in some ways – in very many cases – than the people who don’t have any children at all. The children who come from these families have no real representative in our democracy.

“Why don’t we change that? Now some people will say this is radical and this is crazy. The Democrats are talking about giving the vote to 16-year-olds but let’s do this instead: Let’s give votes to all children in this country but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children.”

*****

The incoming US administration will refuse point-blank to face up to incipient climate catastrophe caused by first world over-consumption of resources in an overpopulated world.

Instead, the quotes above are the “vision” being put forth by the vice-president elect.

Put bluntly, he and his billionaire technocrat backers are speaking about using legislation and social engineering to force the women of the USA back into a position as “breeders” and stay-at-home mothers.

And what are these electorally empowered “breeders” expected to achieve? Other than a simple increase in GOP votes?

Why, a reversal of the demographic trend toward a “brown” or more ethnically mixed USA.

A “white” evangelical Christian family with 8 children and a stay-at-home mother would have a far greater say in elections than a working couple with one or two children.

As far as this writer is aware, there is no constitutional impediment to the implementation of this frankly insane idea.

Bulletproof

16 November 2024/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Bulletproof vest

Is it because he’s a man?

Is it because he’s rich?

Is it because he’s “white”?

He can’t spew enough racist remarks to be condemned as a racist.

He can’t break enough laws or commit enough crimes to be seen as a criminal.

He can’t leverage public office for personal gain blatantly enough to be seen as grasping and venal.

He can’t make enough stupid claims or remarks to be considered an ill-informed oaf.

Evangelical Christians say he is doing “God’s work”, while he:

screws porn stars,
brags about groping women,
mocks disabled people on live TV, and
robs from charities…

If Barack Obama had done even one of the above, he would have been political toast, crucified, run out of office.

If this isn’t proof that the USA is still a profoundly racist country, that “white” male privilege is real, and that money buys power, we are beyond redemption.

*****

Let’s stop dancing to the tune called by propagandists, gaslighters, apologists, and billionaires.

Let’s call it as we see it.

Anyone who voted for this shrivelled husk of a human is either:

dumb as dishwater,
utterly brainwashed/propagandized,
filled with hate and intolerance,
consumed by self-interest and/or greed,
deeply ignorant/uneducated,
a religious nut-job, or
an out-and-out misogynist/racist/fascist.

There are no other reasons to put this man in a position of power.

None.

Stop pretending that “good people” might have chosen him for “the economy”.

If “the economy” comes before human decency, you cannot be considered “good “.

Period.

Post 2024 Election Musings

11 November 2024/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Libertarian Policy at a Glance

I’ve been going in heavy on the politics for the last two months, because it matters.

Sometimes I feel as if this little project – trying to help tear down the lies and myths of US national identity – has been overtaken by “events”.

It’s like setting-up an information stand on a beach, only to look up and see a seismic wave approaching in the distance.

I suppose most people would scream, run for their lives, or simply collapse in a heap of fear and dread.

But the time I spent in Hawaii during my teens taught me there is another option.

Grit your teeth, and grab a surfboard.

J. D. Vance and his svengali Peter Thiel (and other similarly-aligned billionaires) seek nothing less than complete dominion, turning the USA into a technocratic oligarchy – a system they like to call “Libertarianism” in order to disguise a rapacious “dog eat dog” mentality with a fig leaf of “political philosophy”.

Before you dismiss this as the ravings of a conspiracy theorist, just remember that a failed Austrian art student with a chip on his shoulder was able to burn half the world down a few decades ago…

I’ve thrown some lyrics to a largely forgotten song below.

What is life after all, without art to temper the gravity sometimes?

*****

Last Great American Whale

Lou Reed [1989]

They say he didn’t have an enemy
His was a greatness to behold
He was the last surviving progeny
The last one on this side of the world

He measured a half mile from tip to tail
Silver and black with powerful fins
They say he could split a mountain in two
That’s how we got the Grand Canyon

Last great American whale
Last great American whale
Last great American whale
Last great American whale

Some say they saw him at the Great Lakes
Some say they saw him off of Florida
My mother said she saw him in Chinatown
But you can’t always trust your mother

Off the Carolinas, the sun shines brightly in the day
The lighthouse glows ghostly there at night
The chief of a local tribe had killed a racist mayor’s son
And he’d been on death row since 1958

The mayor’s kid was a rowdy pig
Spit on Indians and lots worse
The old chief buried a hatchet in his head
Life compared to death for him seemed worse

The tribal brothers gathered in the lighthouse to sing
And tried to conjure up a storm or rain
The harbor parted, the great whale sprang full up
And caused a huge tidal wave

The wave crushed the jail and freed the chief
The tribe let out a roar
The whites were drowned, the browns and reds set free
But sadly one thing more

Some local yokel members of the NRA
Kept a bazooka in his living room
And thinking he had the chief in his sights
Blew the whale’s brains out with a lead harpoon

Last great American whale
Last great American whale
Last great American whale
Last great American whale

Well, Americans don’t care for much of anything
Land and water the least
And animal life is low on the totem pole
With human life not worth more than infected yeast

Americans don’t care too much for beauty
They’ll shit in a river, dump battery acid in a stream
They’ll watch dead rats wash up on the beach
Complain if they can’t swim

They say things are done for the majority
Don’t believe the half of what you see and none of what you hear
It’s like what my painter friend Donald said to me
“Stick a fork in their ass and turn ’em over, they’re done”