Every once in a blue moon, my mother actually sends me something worth
reading. From here on out, I'm going to stop refering to my heritage as
hillbilly or white trash and start calling myself an Ozark American:
Who are we today? Or: Notes on American ethnography
By Paul Greenberg
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Dear Ozark Correspondent,
It
was wholly a pleasure to hear the newest euphemism in your part of the
state for the now politically incorrect term, hillbilly: Ozark-American.
I love it.
As
an American of the Mosaic Persuasion, I firmly believe that every
ethnic group deserves a multisyllabic moniker fit for polite company.
I've
had some folks resort to every long way around the barn to avoid simply
saying Jew in my presence, as in: Jewish Man/Woman, Hebrew, Israelite,
anything but Jew. It's as if they thought it was a bad word.
So
are hillbillies the same as rednecks? Those categories may overlap, but
they're certainly not the same. You gotta hand it to rednecks; they
don't care who calls 'em rednecks. Indeed, the true redneck takes pride
in the name, and it does beat all heck out of the more scholastic
classification, Southern Yeomanry.
As for the term Poor
Rural White, with its antiseptic odor of sociologese, it will no longer
do now that there are so many rich urban rednecks.
The big
problem with these euphemistic tags for various ethnicities is their
tacit admission that there's something disgraceful about belonging to
one. Hence the need for a more polite name.
By now, like
most Americans, I've developed more than one ethnicity. I used to work
with Mrs. Edna Mays of Pine Bluff, Ark., and her black youth group. It
seemed devoted mainly to the cultivation of good manners and elocution,
no mean arts. Mrs. Mays once presented me with an official-looking
certificate proclaiming me an Honorary Negro Father. I was kind of
proud. It is no small thing to be a father in any ethnicity.
But
the term Negro is now declasse. So should we speak of blacks now, or
have we moved uptown to African-American? (That hyphen annoys, as if
the Americanism of blacks had to be qualified — as in the equally
suspect Italian-American. )
One loses track: Are we just
plain Jews these days or Only Ethnic/Cultural Jews, free at last of all
those outmoded religious beliefs, i.e., the reason for our existence
through the ages?
The surest sign of a people undergoing an identity crisis is that it can't decide what to call itself.
One
of the many joys of reading John Shelton Reed's humor-laced and even
humor-soaked sociology of the South is his treatment of Southerners as
one big sprawling ethnic group with many divisions, some more appealing
than others.
The least appealing may be the professional
Southerner, aka the More Southern Than Thou variety. The species can
often be found up North or on the fringes of the Old Confederacy. It
seems that those most removed from the center of any ethnic group may
be most insecure in their identity and most bent on exaggerating it.
The way Austrians make the most fanatic German nationalists. Or
American Jews the most fervent Zionists.
Southerners are an
unusual American ethnicity in that we're biracial. One can't be any
kind of a Southerner, black or white, without always being aware, even
unconsciously, of the other. When we moved to Little Rock, where the
hills begin, from Pine Bluff in the Arkansas delta, a distance of only
40 miles or so, there were times when we felt as if we'd been
transplanted to the Midwest. (Which would make Northwest Arkansas the
cultural equivalent of Canada.)
It was hard to explain what
was missing in our new environs, but a story may suffice. (A Southerner
will always prefer a good story to a mere explanation.) It seems that
when we were house-hunting in what was then west Little Rock before it
became near-west, we stopped for a burger at a nice little diner. We
both felt there was something amiss about this clean, well-lighted
place with all the pale suburban types at their spic-'n'-span tables.
But we couldn't quite put our finger on it. Till Carolyn, my late wife,
leaned across the table and whispered, "Have you ever seen so many
white folks in your life?"
Yes, that was it. I'd once felt the same strange absence in Minneapolis.
And that's what I like about the South. Now you be sure to write again, y' hear?
In
an attempt to score a lot of viewers, television holiday specials
always seem to have the oddest premises — such as the infamous David Bowie/Bing Crosby pairing and the beyond weird Star Wars Christmas special. Well, this Christmas, we can add another "weird-but-amazing" special to the list: the No Reservations Holiday Special.
