I'm not weird. I would never eat that junk. I just like laughing at it. It's like those pictures of disgusting houses. You like those too right?
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That's exactly it. "Soul food" is just southern food.
It's not a surprise, they had the same culture for a couple hundred years. Black Rednecks and all that. The only differences would be in regards to whether the food came from Appalachian, Cajuin, or Tejanos populations. All still mostly southern, but the ethnic backgrounds of those populations (or isolation in the case of the Appalachian peoples) would make them slightly different.
The worst thing that ever happened to black culture was the great migration, we lost the entirety of the black middle class in a decade, saw the pervasiveness of black ghettos and lost the culture war of north vs south by the 60's.
That makes sense. It's something I never paid attention to much being from the South and all. It also seems the ones that migrated were even the worst of the bunch.
I grew up and worked around a lot of traditional Southern black family oriented, church-going culture. It's exactly what they should look to as their culture as it's the different identity from whites that they want but still actually has good values. Sadly they totally failed to pass it on somehow as the remnants of that are gone. Now somehow black culture is being a ghetto gangster.
I don't agree. Thomas Sowell actually notes that thought the initial migration northward caused racial tensions in the north, there were a significant number of efforts by blacks to improve the culture of southern blacks and integrate them into the north. He points out that racialist laws were enacted during the beginning of the migration, but after about 20-30 years they were actually being stripped away with popular support in many areas. Non-blacks simply didn't see a need to continue enforcing segregationist laws when blacks were not culturally objectionable to the local population (and also didn't threaten the economic security of other groups).
Sidenote: this is really what a lot of racial discrimination boiled down to, some specific group being given special treatment and economic control over certain sectors, and other groups either inadvertently, or advertently, challenging that protectionism. This was a consistent problem in high-immigrant, party-boss run, democratic cities.
The pervasiveness of black ghettos simply did not exist the way it does now until the 1960's and the totalization of blacks under a plantation style welfare state.
Not to mention, that the situation outside of the North and the Neo-Confederate South was also different. This is why activists harp on Tulsa and other black communities in the west. These did not become ghettos because they were founded by people who were freed slaves and decided to build communities from scratch. That's a massive work ethic, with an entrepreneurial spirit, and enough endurance to live through slavery, and then head west. Those are tough people! There's no evidence that the Great Migration out of the south to the west was even a problem. The communities were effectively policing their own behavior.
But Sowell also noted that the integration failed miserably. There is no argument that the ghettos of today were due to the social welfare crusades in the 60s and 70s, however the large integration of southern blacks into northern cities during the great migration did in fact kill the black middle class that was almost entirely integrated with new england culture at the time. This buffer period between the 20s and the 70s when the migration occured ended with the stable black culture annihilated, which Sowell also wrote extensively about, as todays anti intellectualism amongst the black community was yesterday's southern Scottish culture. What Sowell also noted was that foreign born blacks heavily outearned the 'native' city black population, which also speaks to your point on the western frontiers.
I may have been confusing the results of the great migration myself with the results of what came after the migration. I'm too young to have lived in that time, but growing up amongst a decent amount of black people, there do exist remnants of that culture. My perception of the first half of the 20th century is totally different about blacks. They seemed to be far from lazy for one and really just wanted a society where they would be afforded the opportunity to work hard and bear the fruits of that hard work.
I guess I really wonder why such a dramatic shift? Is it really the result of the LBJ "Great Society" and if so, why did blacks take up so easily to the lazy degeneracy of living off the welfare state? Are they culturally lazy, or is it just because there were more poor black people at the time? Meaning that poor white people also became lazy welfare slaves. I know there's plenty of those welfare whites in the redneck South, and I suspect all over the country. Still though, the black community seems to embrace that life now.
I do need to read some Sowell, I've got some of his stuff on my next-to-read list. My understanding is he talks about this type stuff a lot.
Right? Collard greens, grits/hominy, cornbread, fried-anything, I'm not black but had shit like that alllll the time because my grandparents were Southerners. I feel bad for the yankees that didn't grow up with that sort of food. Y'all missed out. fucking yankees