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

Fred Gifford, left; Oregon Klansmen with Portland police, and text excerpt.  Note the highlighted text.

“Some of those that work forces, are the same who burn crosses…”

Rage Against the Machine [1992]

Most people would consider the Ku Klux Klan to be associated primarily with the Deep South.

For reasons too complex to address at length in a short article – post WWI socio-economic issues, the burgeoning eugenics movement, shocking levels of racism, increased US immigration, etc., the KKK reached its highest-ever membership numbers during the 1920s – and not only in southern states.

In 1920, the state of Oregon had a population of around 783,389 souls.

Of that number, between 30,000 and 35,000 were sworn Klan members.  Add in the number of Klan-affiliated women’s and children’s organisations, and we can say that perhaps 1 in 10 Oregonians were directly involved with the Klan in some way, making Oregon by far the largest host to Klan activities west of the Mississippi River at the time.

With 50 chapters statewide, the pervasiveness of the Klan presence ensured that its members had a huge influence on elections, state governance, legislation, public policy, and law enforcement.

Oregon had a relatively tiny African-American population at the time, and much KKK activity was focussed on keeping it that way.  Many of its other activities during the 1920s revolved around an attempt to ring-fence Oregon as a haven for white Protestants.  The Klan’s political clout ensured an ongoing hostile environment for Catholics, Jews, and all non-“white” immigrants – especially Blacks and East Asians.

For a number of reasons, including having some of its flagship legislation deemed unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court (and due to much political infighting), the Klan in Oregon had withered away to a shadow of its former self by 1930, but only after a decade of making Oregon a weirdly distorted and more orderly mirror twin to the sinister social engineering which was unfolding rather more chaotically in Germany at the same time.

Oregon’s last publicly acknowledged “Grand Dragon” would be Fred L. Gifford, who died in 1945, thoroughly unrepentant.

Mr. Gifford could have never envisaged a future world where a lone blogger and podcaster living on the side of a mountain would have access to digitised records documenting the history of his family – its occupations, migrations, and ethnic details.

And this is also why it seems almost certain that Mr. Grand Dragon never breathed a word to his mincing underlings about his “complicated” family.

You see, Frederick Louis Gifford‘s father Benjamin Gifford had been a saloon-keeper back in Minnesota, where his son Fred Gifford was born before moving to the American northwest in the early 1900s.

Benjamin Gifford had children by two different women.  One was Fred Gifford’s mother.  The other wasn’t really a woman.  She was a 15-year-old Chippewa girl who had just managed to turn 16 by the time she gave birth to her first of three children by Benjamin Gifford.

I have been unable to discover how the “Grand Dragon” of the Oregon KKK treated his “non-white” half siblings.

I have also been unable to discover how the “Grand Dragon” of the Oregon KKK reacted when his daughter Loretta married a man of Jewish descent named Leon Rothschild.

Fascists, racists, and bigots rarely leave memoirs saying “I was wrong”.

#klan #racism #oregonhistory #beforewewerewhite

Charles Manson and first wife Rosalie Jean Willis

Rosalie Jean Willis.

Wedding day. January 1955.

Just a young sixteen-year-old girl from West Virginia, charmed by a charismatic young man first christened “Charles Milles Maddox” – Charles taking his mother’s surname rather than that of his biological father Walker Henderson Scott.

Charles would go on to become a “religious leader”, better-known by the name he took from a later stepfather – Manson.

Rosalie would leave Charles after a couple of years (having had only one child together), but her new life choices brought no joy – it almost seems as if a curse had been laid upon her.

One son by her second marriage to Jack Bandy White – a boy named Jed White – would die of an accidental gunshot wound at the age of 11 in 1971.

Jed White’s older brother Jesse James White would die of a drug overdose in his 20s in 1986.

But this would not be the end.  Rosalie’s oldest son by her teen marriage to Charles Manson – Charles Manson, Jr., aka “Jay White” – would die of a gunshot wound in an apparent suicide in 1993.

Charles Manson of the Tate-LaBianca murders of 1969 was descended from Appalachian “Black Dutch” Clines and the mixed-ethnic McCoys of Hatfield/McCoy feud fame.  His ancestral lines also included Scotts and Ingrams, many of whom were likely to have been descended from British Romani transported to America during colonial times.

Transgenerational poverty, trauma and dysfunction is real among all American underclasses of all colors, and the alleviation of it should be part of any enlightened program for government.

#beforewewerewhite #poverty #transgenerationaltrauma

Hugh Goins with fellow soldiers, WWII

About 16 million American men and women served during WWII.

Of these 16 million, about 1 million were African-Americans.

Nearly half a million were Hispanic- or Latin-Americans.

Including indigenous Americans, Japanese Americans, Filipinos, and other ethnic minorities, perhaps 1 in 7 service members were from what would be considered a “non-white” background according to American “race” categories of the time.

While stationed or fighting in Europe, many “white” American soldiers tried to export their American apartheid/segregationalist attitudes, leading to tensions and outright violence in European countries where American people of color were often widely accepted in cafes, bars and nightclubs for the first time in their lives.

Coming from a world where men of color could be lynched for daring to flirt or dance with a “white” woman, many “white” American GIs were shocked and outraged to see African-American men dancing and co-mingling freely with European women receptive to their charms and overtures.

There is little to be gained from pointing-out how few of these men have ever been represented in the innumerable films made about WWII.

But here’s the twist.  In the photo below you will find men bearing the surname “Goins“.

Goins is a core surname among the people from the hills and hollers of Southern Appalachia known as “Melungeons“.

There are as many lines of Goins people in Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Missouri as there are trees in the woods.

They have ancestors in Africa. And ancestors among the Tuscarora.  And the Catawba.  The Creek and the Cherokee.

They are intermarried with Appalachian families of German, French, Scottish, Welsh, English, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Iberian, South Asian, Malagasy, Jewish and Romani ancestry.

It is simply a matter of happenstance, petty bureaucracy, circumstance, accident, racist legislation, war, epidemic, luck, love, lust or affection which determined whether a Goins (or any other person) fell on one side or the other of American “race” classifications.

Some of the men in this photo are my cousins – real, actual “blood” relatives – but the Wheel of Fortune landed on “white” in the end for most of my family.

This situation is true for the majority of people from an underclass background with deep roots in colonial era America.

As Americans, our so-called “race” has often been determined by one single fork in the road, or one or two marriages made by mountain folks 200 or more years ago.

Until we understand this, we are doomed to fight identity wars among ourselves.

Identitarian conflict only benefits wealthy, unscrupulous politicians who use this constructed social division to distract us from fighting for the real prize – universal social justice and equality.

#WWII #melungeon #appalachia #beforewewerewhite

Schoolchildren reciting the pledge while giving the “Bellamy Salute”

Just a reminder of the ridiculous and messy internal contradictions which make-up American identity.

The Pledge of Allegiance was written by a Christian Socialist named Francis Bellamy in 1892.  Yes, you read that right.

A socialist.

“I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Between 1948 and 1951, right wing organisations such as the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution and the Catholic Knights of Columbus began adding the words “under God” after “one nation” in their own recitations of the original pledge.

Various Christian organisations began agitating hard for the original Bellamy pledge to be amended, mostly as a religious-ideological response to the officially declared atheism of Marxist/Leninist countries during the height of the Cold War.

The phrase “under God” was eventually incorporated into the “official” Pledge of Allegiance on June 14, 1954, by a Joint Resolution of Congress.

So much for the “separation of church and state” espoused by Thomas Jefferson.

Image: Schoolchildren reciting the pledge while giving the “Bellamy Salute“.  The salute was later changed for obvious reasons…

#beforewewerewhite #socialism #patriotism