Urban Bias
I’ve heard a lot of people chalking up a lot of the poverty/abandonment issues to race in the whole hurricane thing. I have a bit of a different perspective from spending most of my life in the rural South. There’s an economic stratification that renders race sort of irrelevant. In my opinion, a lot of this goes right back the aftermath of the American Civil War. Since then, the North (and rich northerners who came south to rack up money over the agrarian war-torn South) has created a lower class amongst Southerners that they rule over economically.
Most Southern families who have lived in the South for generations are poor. Those who do have money tend to have been those who aligned themselves with the carpetbaggers. There is a strong resentment of families with money in the Deep South/rural South, and while most folks can’t tell you where their hostility comes from, I can assure you that it’s almost always a family bias brought about for the reasons I mentioned above.
When hurricanes rip through rural areas and cause devastation just as crippling to those in trailer parks and small homes on rivers, no one gives a shit, and it turns into a cultural joke in no time. Such folks almost never get true disaster relief because their homes get undervalued by insurance adjusters and appraisers, and honestly also because there is a strong distrust of the government (born out of, again, the mistreatment during the Reconstruction amplified by the retelling through generations).
Nearly all of the issues I hear folks talking about in relation to urban areas are also problems in rural areas of the South. Unemployment is almost always higher. Sexually transmitted diseases are rampant. (For a time in the 1990s, Hamilton County was the STD capital of Florida per capita. Miami/Dade County was second.) Crime is an ever present concern, and law enforcement rarely gives enough of a shit to actually enforce laws in poor areas. Education isn’t culturally valued. (Six folks from my school came to college with me. I’m on the only one that actually earned a degree.)
So anyway, it’s not really connected directly with the hurricane, but I just wanted to mention all of that. New Orleans has a chance to get fixed. The urban/Northern biased media will make it enough of an issue that action will happen. How many trailer parks in Mississippi will actually get the aid that they need? How many CNN news crews will be covering that angle of the disaster? How many FEMA executives will actually check up on how the corrupt state governments are allocating their disaster funds? (Hint: The riverboat casino owners will get plenty of remuneration, but nary a penny will make its way into the pocket of the farmer (yep, we still have those down here) who lost almost all of this year’s crop to flooding.)
The stereotypical stupid southerner is just as disgusting a stereotype as the big-lipped chicken-eating lazy negro. In both cases, it is a means of control of a population that is out of favor with the majority.
Technorati Tags: Southern Politics, Stereotypes, Civil War, Reconstruction