As a former white Southerner, I'd like to inform you (and her!) that those "compulsary education" statutes were always very sketchily enforced for the majority of white folks in the South--the "crackers"! I once saw a study that indicated that, in terms of land-reform (something pushed by "liberal" Americans all over the world) that South Carolina had had less redistribution of land-ownership since the 19th century than a number of banana republics in Central America. What a lot of Yankees need to consider--and start worrying about, as the South more and more dominates American Presidential politics--is that the culture of the South is traditionally hierarchic, militarist and anti-egalitarian. Zora didn't know what the hell she was talking about. Sounds to me that, like a bunch of the so-called "Agrarian Romantics," she was seeing the South through rose-coloured glasses: you know, the land of the benevolent, "caring" plantation-owners, just as much "attached" to their happy "Nigras" as to their patrimonial land-holdings. All of that is a crock!
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branchandroot
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Date: 2004-05-17 02:14 pm (UTC)Little did Zora know!
Date: 2004-05-17 04:03 pm (UTC)I once saw a study that indicated that, in terms of land-reform (something pushed by "liberal" Americans all over the world) that South Carolina had had less redistribution of land-ownership since the 19th century than a number of banana republics in Central America. What a lot of Yankees need to consider--and start worrying about, as the South more and more dominates American Presidential politics--is that the culture of the South is traditionally hierarchic, militarist and anti-egalitarian. Zora didn't know what the hell she was talking about. Sounds to me that, like a bunch of the so-called "Agrarian Romantics," she was seeing the South through rose-coloured glasses: you know, the land of the benevolent, "caring" plantation-owners, just as much "attached" to their happy "Nigras" as to their patrimonial land-holdings. All of that is a crock!