are hillbillies an ethnic group?
Do American hillbillies qualify as an ethnic group?
It all depends on what your definition of “ethnic group” encompasses. It’s one of those terms like “liberal” that is both prickly and nebulous enough as to be useless. The earliest anthropologists (eg. Franz Boas) subscribed to a phenotypical categorization of ethnicity; that is, ethnicity is determined primarily by racial identity, and other determinants of ethnicity, such as religion, shared history and cultural traditions, geographical origin and behavioral norms themselves stemmed from racial identity.
This interpretation went out of vogue in the middle of the twentieth century, largely as a reponse to eugenics, anti-Semitism and the abuses of colonial authority in the Third World. My own corollary here is that the pressures of the Cold War created a need for a collectively-identified enemy whose “otherness” was not explicitly racially defined, and this contributed to the movement to classify “ethnic groups” as being culturally defined.
I tend to side with the older definition even though it’s out of fashion, because I think that race identification played the primary role in defining the origins of the culture and to deny so is PC-whitewashing a racially touchy past. People are shaped by their histories, which are shaped in tremendous part by the relative privileges of their race (or a lack thereof). While individual contemporary humans have tremendous social mobility, historically speaking, it’s a very new phenomenon and not enough time has passed to let this freedom redefine the concept of ethnicity. That will take several, if not many, more generations.
So to answer the question, no, I don’t think hillbillies are an ethnic group. But I do think melungeons are.
4 years ago • 25 notes
