[olalonde]

"Black Rednecks and White Liberals" by Thomas Sowell is pretty interesting.

tl;dr: Sowell contends that the "black ghetto culture", characterized by violence, a lack of ambition, a dismissive attitude toward education, and a casual approach to work, is not inherent to African-Americans. Instead, he argues that it is a cultural relic of white southern 'Redneck' or 'Cracker' culture, which was brought to the South by immigrants from the more lawless regions of Britain.

These immigrants, according to Sowell, came from areas that were marked by a resistance to work, a lack of education, a predilection for violence, and a general disregard for the law. These cultural traits, Sowell argues, were absorbed by the African-American population in the South during the era of slavery and have been perpetuated in certain communities to this day.

[denton-scratch]

> 'Cracker' culture

Thanks, I never came across this usage before.

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/07/01/197644761...

[Exoristos]

More seriously, 'The Yearling' is a pretty great depiction of this (traditional lower-class white) culture in the southern U.S.

[Exoristos]

Just say Scots. We can handle it.

[kps]

Border reivers were both English and Scottish, and not always particularly concerned about whether their targets were ‘ours’ or ‘theirs’.

Sowell probably drew from Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer, which argues that US culture arose from four different British subcultures.