Reply #50: Not all sharecroppers were black. [View All]

[Bridget Burke]

Neil Foley wrote "The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture"--an interesting study based in East & Central Texas, but mostly relevant to the rest of the South.

Foley negotiates this ambiguous terrain by situating the narratives of African Americans, Mexicans, and poor whites within the larger context of agrarian transformation and white racial construction between the Civil War and the New Deal. Central to their stories is the collapse of an agricultural ladder whereby young male farmhands climbed through the stages of hired hand, sharecropper, and tenant farmer to farm owner. Influenced by eugenics, legislators, and large-scale ranchers, researchers blamed the failure of the system on the wretched racial hygiene of feeble-minded poor whites and the inferiority of Mexicans and blacks rather than on a land tenure system that privileged wealthy landowners.....

Foley convincingly argues that the "empty and terrifying attempts to build an identity based on what one isn't and on whom one can hold back" has supported racial hierarchies in the United States and has subverted potential interracial coalitions to bring about systemic change in a society dominated by class, racial, and gender inequality.

I've read the book; quotations are from this review: www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2082/is_2_62/ai_60578659

Edited to amplify that subversion of potential interracial coalitions--beware of those who seek to cause division, whether they're setting Blue States versus Red States. Or putting hot-button items on the ballot, so people end up voting against their own best interests.