As a dyed in the wool, Southern born, bred and raised son of a real Southern sharecropper of the first generation in my family to be raised off the farm I think I have as good an understanding of life in the Southland as anyone alive today and a perspective totally different than that of the Southern Elites with their pseudo civil, polite Southern society ways.
Southern cultural norms were established in a time when Southern elites ruled with heavy hands over slaves, indentured servants and sharecroppers alike. It's time we got over it. To be polite to someone while watching them steal from you is tantamount to pleading, "Massa, whoop me a hunnerd mo lashes, pleas!"
My daddy lied about his age and enlisted in the United States Army during World War II at age 15 to escape sharecropping but before he could make his way out of the North Carolina mountains to report to duty, the high sheriff arrested him because his father, who had died 2 years before, still owed money to the land owner the family sharecropped for. Had it not been for the arrival of a US Army Colonel and several Military Police from Fort Bragg who threaten the sheriff with more firepower than the sheriff had ever before seen, Daddy and others like him would have faced hard labor without ever having a trial.
This was going on across the South and nationwide in farming communities everywhere as local Elites, even in a time of war that threatened the entire world, searched for new ways to maintain their grip on society.
Slavery in America didn't end with the Civil War or the 2nd World War, it simply changed and new systems were created that allow the Elites to steal from us without the use of the whip. Today it's done through taxation, incentives to corporations, corporate welfare, kick-backs to politicians and local governments like Greensboro, North Carolina whose intentional lack of transparency and the picking and choosing of winners and loosers always favors the status quo elites.
Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, rich, poor or middle class, it's time to get over it. When they're robbing you, don't show them where you hide the silver and gold even if they do say please and thank you, Ma'am.
And remember, getting over it means doing something about it.
