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Lecture Ten - Race

In this section look at the theories and reality of race and ethnicity in the United States. I focus on Appalachians as cultural group. First, we look at the defining features of race and ethnicity, racism, and discrimination. Then, we look at the nature of immigration into the U.S. and perspectives on group interaction. Finally, I overview Appalachian geography, culture, and the present status of the region.

I. Race Defined

Race in America is a very difficult concept to understand. Between 1850 and the turn of the 19th century race evolved in the social sciences as a way to distinguish people throughout the world. Anthropology used biological classifications to distinguish western and nonwestern people. By seeing some cultures as lower order and uncivilized colonialism over nonwestern countries was justified. Racial purity was a main focus of Hitler. In the rest of the West and the U.S. people who were criminals, handicapped, minority, and unhealthy were sterilized to ensure racial purity until Hilter's war ended. With World War Two, came the end of biological perspectives on race. The idea of multiculturalism evolved in the 1960s to explain the multiple realities found within populations. Multiculturalism is the idea that we need to represent all racial and ethnic groups in the educational curriculum.

Today, in communities, the workplace, and the general population America is a land of diversity. Race is best explained by culture and experience.

Ethnic Groups are groups which share common experiences. They can be cultural or racial or religious (Jews, Mormons) or nationalities (Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans). In reality, race has little meaning until people act on it. Dark skinned British have little in common culturally with African Americans. While biology plays a role in skin color and adaptation, race is still a social construct. The Swedish people take light therapy in the Winter due to a lack of sunlight. They have blond hair and light features for the same reason. Yet Swedes, as with anyone, hate others only if taught. Race is created by humans for their purposes. People interpret the world then act on it.

Indigenous populations are native to a region. For instance, the American native population is indigenous. Indigenous people make up between five and ten percent of the world's population. Indigenous as a status relates to lifestyle more than anything else. Many are distinctive cultures who speak a language different than the larger population in the country were they live. Brazil has 180 different people (s). African contries often contain hundreds. Indigenous cultures are often located on natural resources. They control 25 to 30 percent of the world's surface. Much of it uninhabited by more recent cultures. You may be conscious of the Inuit and Eskimo, aborigines, pigmies, or Navaho to name a few examples. Most have been colonized by larger nation states. Many are poor. In Mexico, for example, you will find over 56 different languages with indigenous people the most poverty stricken cultures. In the arctic two million natives speak 150 different languages (Thein 1993). Indigenous people often are stewards of the land. They are engaged in sustainable use of resources to survive. They are conscious of being on land that several generations lived on. They aim to preserve their way of life by preserving the land that creates it and want to leave land and place to their children instead of money (Thein 1993). Yet today, reservation tribes face many of the same problems with the environment that the rest of American society does.

The Cherokee represented one of the most advanced tribes prior to contact with Europeans. There are 200,000 tribal members today. 70,000 live on the Cherokee nation in Oklahoma. The nation has its own form of government and a constitution.

www.cherokee.org The Cherokee Nation Official Site. See the websites below for more information and examples on indigenous people.

Racism -Means to see one group as inferior to another. The British shot Australian Aborigines for sport. Blacks were segregated during the Jim Crow period in the U.S. (1890-1965). Today, Indians in England are persecuted. Turks in Germany are singled out as foreigners by hate groups. The Kurds in Turkey or Iraq are discriminated against. North Africans are minorities in France. Many groups are the legacy of colonization. For instance, the Laps and Sami in Sweden and Denmark and the Eskimos and Inuit in Canada and America are northern reminders of the colonization of native peoples in the artic.

Racism varies by history and the relationship between groups. Powerless groups in any country are termed minorities. Minorities may be a majority of the population such as in South Africa or even rural Mississippi but they do not control the social institutions they live under. Racism can lead to hate crimes. Hate crimes are criminal acts against a group because of the their group affiliation.

Discrimination is to act based on hatred. It can be individual or institutional. When we act on racism, sexism, or ageism we discriminate. It can deprive people of education, employment, or health. Institutional discrimination is bound in the rules and practices of society. Segregation laws in pre-1965 U.S. are examples of institutional discrimination. It is also not allowing women in certain occupations or clubs. Individual discrimination is when an individual depreciates someone. Keeping back students who speak with an accent or have a different culture is individual discrimination.

Stereotypes are generalizations about a group. Below, we look at stereotypes about Appalachians. Stereotypes are a way to characterize a human being. They can lead to negative interpretations of that same human being. Appalachians as uneducated rural rednecks who are lazy are stereotypes. Mean spirited characterizations are a part of racism. Native cultures in the U.S. have fought the use of Native American characterizations in sports. The Braves, the Indians, and the Redskins all invoke visions of Native Americans as an uncivilized racial group.

II. Theories of Contact

Until 1945 the main groups coming into the United States were from western and eastern Europe. Fewer came at different times from Asia, and Africa. Hispanics mainly from Mexico were the main exception to Europeans. Immigration from Asia, mainly Chinese and Japanese, was halted in 1924 with acts closing off immigrants from nonwestern countries and eastern Europe.

Nonnative America was initially settled by Western Europeans between 1650 and 1770. The British, Germans, Scots-Irish, and French fought the natives and strove for empire in the Americas. The Swedes and Danes in the North, the Germans in Pennsylvania, and the Scots-Irish in South Carolina moved straight across the country. Slaves and freed blacks made up over 20 percent of the population in 1790. Today, almost 22 percent of Americans have German heritage, the most of any group. They spoke English, typically were protestant, and took on English common law. Today, the Northeast and Midwest have German and Swedish heritage. The South is influenced by Scots-Irish and black slavery.

In the years following the Civil War the Irish, the Italians, and eastern Europeans flooded northern cities and factories building industrial America. They were poor and spoke different languages and often were Catholic, Jewish, or Greek Orthodox. Asians were mainly in the West. They build the railroads and like the eastern Europeans were persecuted for differences.

By 1924, immigration restrictions reduced immigration to western Europe again. After WWII, Hispanics began to work in agriculture and were followed by non-western populations from Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the 1960s. Since this period the main immigrants into the U.S. have been non-westerners. Vietnamese after 1975, Guatemalans, Mexicans, and other Hispanic populations began to come into the east in the 1980s. Today, blacks make up 13 percent of the population while Hispanics make up 8 percent. Asians make up 4 percent. In the next 20 years, Hispanics will surpass blacks as the largest minority group.

The perspectives used to explain America have to cover a lot of variation. We can see America as a Western European based country where absorption assimilation occurred after the English established language and legal codes. Or we can see it as a melting pot where each culture contributes something and changes America into something different. Our foodways are are by product of many cultures: pizza, Mexican, Chinese, British, African, German food all are part of America. We can also look at America as a pluralist nation where subcultural identity is maintained. Minority groups often maintain their heritage. We are a nation of many cultures. Pluralism is the idea that the country has many, multiple identities. Which theory makes sense to you?

Hispanics in the South: A major change in southern culture is the growth in Hispanics mentioned above. In the South, between 1990 and 2000 the Hispanic or Latino population has grown the most of any group. The following is a list of population growth for selected southern states in the 10 year period. Georgia 300% increase to 435,227 persons; North Carolina 393% to 378,963 persons; Virginia 105% to 329,540 persons; Tennessee 278% to 123,838 persons.

How has this growth impacted your community? How you tried some of the new Mexican food? Do you thing you might learn Spanish someday? Regardless know of Hispanic culture is important to the survival of people working in the emerging economy. Many U.S. industries will be selling products to Hispanic populations in the near future. Today Mexico is the United States number one trading partner.

III. Appalachia: Geography

The geography of Appalachia runs from Georgia to Canada. The Appalachian mountain range is among the oldest in the world. It is, in the present, a major refuge for wildlife for the rapidly developing eastern part of the United States. The biological differentiation found in the region is rivaled by no other region in North America. The Smoky Mountains have a greater species mix than any region north of the tropics.

The ranges protect the east from tornados and shape the weather of eastern cities. The mountains are not isolated but surrounded by half of the American population. They are one of the few examples of a post-development mountain ecosystem in the world. In North Carolina are found 43 peaks above 6,000 feet and 82 peaks above 5,000 feet. Less than 200 miles from Morristown we find the highest peak in the eastern past of the United States.

In theory, the mountain ranges are wrinkles caused by the collusion of continental shelves. They are 200 million years old. In the 1880s, virgin forests of chestnut, oak, tulip and yellow poplar, and walnut trees were cut - some being 15 and 20 feet across. Coal was mined in West Virginia by the 1850s. Coal country is found mainly in the Cumberland Plateau in eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Diversified industrial and farm economies are found in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia which share the region's tourism with north Georgia and West Virginia.

The geography of Southern Appalachia is divided into three sections. The Cumberland Plateau from Alabama to West Virginia, the Valley sections of Alabama, east Tennessee, and Virginia, and the Blue Ridge Mountains from North Georgia to Virginia. East Tennessee is in all three geographical zones.

Culture

Southern culture is a defining feature for many people in Appalachia. West Virginia is the only state entirely in Appalachia. East Tennesseans typically do not see themselves as Appalachians but as southerners. Yet they are in the ridge and valley and mountainous sections of the region. Tennesseans themselves are separated by which part of the region they live in. Hancock or Cocke counties are designated as mountainous where Hamblen and Knox are in the valley of Appalachia.

Culturally, Appalachians were defined as a culture is a distinctive area by northern journalist in the 1880s. The 'color writers' as they were called started to define the region as undeveloped and people still living in American's past. During this period, outside capitalists bought the land in the coalfields and brought in miners. In the valley of east Tennessee, towns started to attract northern factories and capital to utilize low-wage southern labor. Today, Appalachian culture is still sometimes seen as a stereotype extending from this period. Television shows and movies such as Deliverance portray the region as backward and underdeveloped.

Today, we still have rural stereotypes in the American lexicon. Terms like redneck, hayseeds, crackers, peckerwoods, lintheads, bubbas, and yokels are applied to rural Appalachia. The region serves as one of the last areas or groups where derogative stereotypes are allowed. In reality, the main social designation for many in the region is the working class. The region sent more people to Vietnam than any other. During the war, however, just as many died in its factories, driving its trucks, and in other work related injuries.

Appalachia is rural. There are few cities. The region has a tradition of small locally, controlled churches and communities. Small church congregations were and are democratic based social systems where outside influence is minimal. The southern baptist are the largest social group where small protestant churches are the norm for the region. Culturally, Appalachia is one of the most homogeneous areas in the U.S. English, German, and Scots- Irish are mixed with blacks and a small minority of other groups. In the south, western Europeans are the largest groups where as in the coalfields eastern Europeans made up a larger component of the population. Today, Hispanics and non-whites are changing the nature of population through the region. This is even more so in economically expanding areas such as east Tennessee.

Appalachian foodways came directly from the Native Americans. Settlers ate corn, beans, greens, cornbread, grits, biscuits, wild game, and salted pork. Simple peasant food still persists in the area today. Appalachia has much of the same foodways as the south. Today, Appalachians call their own foods like okra (African), pinto beans (Native American), fried chicken (English), and cornbread (Native American) which are combined with foods from England (chicken pot pie, white bread, boiled cabbage), Germany (fried potatoes, bologna, dumplings, apple butter, cold slaw) and France and Africa (gumbo, jambalaya, yams, peanuts, rice, peas).

Appalachia Today

Poverty and development in Appalachia have been addressed by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and various programs in the 1960s including the development schemes of the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC). Poverty is still a fact of life in West Virginia and eastern Kentucky's coalfields. In much of the region, poverty has been reduced. Rurality is still the main factor for poverty as small and isolated communities are more likely to have large populations below the poverty line. Appalachia still contains much of America's resources (coal, timber, gas, water). The future success of the region depends on who controls the resources and their stewardship.

East Tennessee is rapidly changing. As its farm land is turned to development its culture is also transforming. As we have discussed the McDonaldization of society and changing family systems are altering the ways of life of many communities in the region. While the most isolated areas in Appalachia face out-migration and poverty, growing areas are struggling with expanding tourism, industrialization, suburban growth, and population pressure on ecosystems. Recent studies on the Smoky Mountians and east Tennessee reveal pollution similar to major cities in the U.S. such as Los Angeles. Also poverty in Appalachia is in opposition to the idea that poverty is nonwhite. Poverty here has mainly a white face. Single parents and low-skilled workers are more likely to be poor in the region as in the rest of America. In rural Appalachia, unemployment, loss of skilled workers, a lack of funding for schools, and infrastructure are major blocks to development.

The region is beginning to look more and more like middle America. The rurality of the region has become a major draw for immigrants from other states and countries. Southern Appalachia and east Tennessee are developing rapidly. Many of the folkways and foodways in rural east Tennessee are being lost to mainstream mass society.

Notes and Suggested Readings (All of these books are in the WSCC Library: I personally ordered them)

Baker, Chris. 1997. Appalachian Studies: Syllabus Guide and Teaching Materials.

Billings, Dwight. 1999. Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes: Backtalk From an American Region. University of Kentucky press.

Davis, Donald. 1999. Where There are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians. Athens: Georgia Press.

Nolt, John et al. 1997. What have We Done? The Foundation of Global Sustainability's State of the Bioregion Report for the Upper Tennessee Valley and the Southern Appalachian Mountains. Washburn: Earth Knows Press.

Pillsbury, Richard. 1998. No Foreign Food; The American Diet in Time and Place. WestView Press.

Thein, Alan. 1993. "Supporting Indigenous Peoples" State of the World's Peoples. (WW Norton WorldWatch Institute).

Questions:

1) Should America be bilingual? (have more than one national language)

2) Which perspective on contact do you think best describes America?

3) Are Appalachians an ethnic group why? Why not?

4) Which Appalachian stereotypes are the most common to you?

Have a great multicultural day!

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