Humans will get violent over a damn chicken sandwich.
If there’s one thing our species is good at, it’s finding excuses to kill each other.
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Not quite sure what to make of this. Mom was born in Appalachia in 1918. Her father was Irish and Native American. Her mother was Scottish. My wife makes fun of me when I say acrost the street instead of across, or other Appalachian phrases I grew up hearing in my home that reflected my mother’s dialect. But my Grandfather was a successful store keeper and my Grandmother was the local school teacher, hardly ignorant, lazy loafs. But my mom did speak poorly of what she called hill trash.
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Culture will always be the catalyst.
“They’re different, and I don’t like that!”
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Yeah, she was talking about my people there. Except they weren’t lazy, just poor. Lazy people don’t spend all day in coal mines for a dollar a day. Or subsistence farm and cut their own wood for the winter.
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She wasn’t talking about miners and farmers, my dad was a farm boy growing up with only a 6th grade education. This was some back woods clan up in the Holler in the Cumberland Falls area of Kentucky.
There is a huge difference between discipline and beating a child.
I think I swatted my son on the bottom all of two times. He was absolutely shocked. This accomplished two things: (1) he wasn’t immune to getting a swat on the bottom and (2) never repeat the behavior again.
I believe that you have to set your rules and the punishment. A parent has to follow through. It mostly hurts us more than the child but in the end, they learn that you mean what you say.
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I believe the further back in the past you go, the blurrier that line gets. But I also don’t think a few spankings will make a thug as someone who received a few spankings. Actually once my mom gave me the choice of staying in my room for a couple of hours or getting a spanking and I choose the spanking because it was faster.
That said, I believe there are some in this thread who don’t think hitting a child does anything when its done by a woman and not a man.
Every child is different and responds differently.
As I said, a child really needs discipline, structure and consistency. They need to know that when they cross a line, they will be punished as appropriate to their age.
A swat on the butt is a whole lot different than beating a child so they can’t sit down.
People who do things like that should have their children taken away from them, IMO.
I don’t disagree.
You’re the one who referenced the black culture in 1880. I think we can all agree that whatever culture the slaves had before they were captured and forced to come to America was taken, but if you then claim they adopted white culture we shouldn’t see a big difference and yet we do. Why?
I’ve never understood why blacks today, the vast majority never having been to Africa, took the term “African American” to describe themselves. You tell me. As a black man, does the “African” part of the description refer to your culture or skin color?
You resent being treated differently than white people. You label white people “racists” without having the courtesy to spell out why. You claim there is no difference while at the same time proudly and militantly clinging to differences. Black parents give their children African sounding names. Why? Unless you want to be identified as different than White Americans.
You can’t have it both ways. Either there are cultural differences or there aren’t. I think it’s pretty obvious there are. Do we really need to try and describe the differences to acknowledge they’re real?
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I’m not sure.
I think the whole African thing is based on feeling solidarity with the rest of the African diaspora.
I never understood it. I feel no solidarity with people of African descent who aren’t fellow Americans. I don’t use the term African-American to describe myself at all. I don’t feel any solidarity with black Haitians or black Brazilians. We may all come from the same place originally and our ancestors were brought over the same way, but I feel no relation to them.
Hell, Sharlto Copley is certainly more African than I could ever be. And he’s as white as my Honda Civic. He was born and raised in South Africa. He knows the old continent. I know nothing of it.
I don’t understand why some members of the community feel such an attachment to a land they’ve never known and do not understand and barring moving there will never understand.
Perhaps being half white and being raised by southern whites changes my views on things. But I feel kinship with my fellow American whites, American blacks, American Latinos, and American Asians. I don’t feel any kinship for non American members of the African diaspora or even Africa itself.
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All I know is my family in Appalachia were labeled white trash and their main offense was being working poor.
Me at twelve after the divorce, mom wanted to take the belt to me for sneaking out to see Jaws, took the belt away and said, this is not happening any more. I am anti-corporal punishment for children, unles it’s a violent male. They need their asses kicked to stay in line.
What about violent females? How do you get them to stay in line?
This is probably more relevant than being around “rednecks” from the south.
My dad’s family grew up in a rural community in Georgia. His parents do not fit the description of “redneck”.
They worked for a living, with grandmom supplementing their income by the time the two kids were in their teens.
They lived within their means. Dad went to college on ROTC and his sister married on becoming pregnant, missing out on nursing college.
Black people living in Georgia during that time most likely would have grown up with dad in the house as keeping a baby outside wedlock was highly stigmatized.
I’m going to go ahead and disagree with the OP. Black Americans at one time were more likely to marry and to be able to pass civil service exams for government jobs.
Per Mr. Sowell in other articles, black children showed more progress in public schools close to home than they did being bussed. IMO the decline in black American communities is more related to destigmatizing out of wedlock births.
Incidentally I’m not offended by that “lazy” English and one is actually better off dealing with white “rednecks” than with the smug, smarmy types who migrated north and are better at sanitizing their disdain for those different than the rednecks. They may be cruel, but at least you know where you stand with them.
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Some of us choose to stay in Appalachia. The easiest life would have been to continue living in the big city but after 7 years, it was time to return to Free Appalachia.
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Currently…in the south…from what I am personally witnessing, it’s the least racist place in the entire country.
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I believe it, having previously lived in both southwestern and southeastern states & done a little touring of both eastern & western parts of the country.
It’s interesting how little discussions of race actually take place the further west one travels. Seems all the comparisons take place among populations in the northeast & southeast.
I wonder why that is.
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Way less common but in that case I go with psychiatry. Heck I go that way with boys as well for the most part. Never hit my girls and they turned out fine except for being liberal.
Hill trash 
