If anything I’ve been seeing it a lot more in the past few years than before. It’s a pity because I prefer African-American and European-American because there are a lot of people whom it is fashionable to call “brown” whose skin is quite dark, and it opens the possibility for people to identify as a different ethnicity such as recent immigrants from Africa who can specify their country of origin, and it more specifically designates European Caucasians as opposed to people who are closely genetically related but are currently not considered “white” by today’s arbitrary standards.
Plus “black” and “white” and to a lesser extent “brown” already designate colors, with their own centuries of baggage and symbolism attached to them even outside of race.
Before this thread I did consider “Antebellum” innocuous in this context but I’ve changed my mind. After all, it could just refer to the romanticized vision of the old south, but that’s almost entirely wrapped up in slavery. It’s not the hard working yeoman farmer we picture on the verandah.
They’re formed in and produced out of Nashville. They top country charts far more frequently and higher than they do pop charts.
They’ve won 8 Academy of Country Music awards, 9 American Country Awards, 6 CMA awards, and several Billboard, Grammy, AMA, and People’s Choice awards in Country categories.
You may think of them as pop. But country thinks of them as country and when there’s a choice of which category to put them in, they get slotted into country not pop.
I have a number of friends who are White African ex-pats and newly-Americans, and they laugh at the term, and one wondered what kinds of scholarships he could apply for.
Lest you balk at the term 'White" (I did on the census… put my hand on the paper, said “That is NOT white.” and wrote in “Pink”)… these folk are of Dutch extraction. The joke is that they had to emigrate and marry other ethnicities, or their kids would be see-through.
I too balked at the census question about race, although I filled it out online and I don’t remember an “other” option. It was just a checkbox, but it still felt a little bad allowing myself to be put in a box that others had built for me without my permission. But then after that, to add insult to … insult, it asked me for my ethnicity! WTH am I supposed to put there, having English, Irish, Polish, German-Christian, and German-Jewish ancestors? Thankfully, there was an “other” option there and I put “Anglo”, because the thing I identify most with is my language, and “Anglophone” isn’t really recognized as an ethnicity.
But it is only through the lens of northern whiteness and the history of jim crow and white supremacy that you and I may have the luxury to think that way. When the south lost the war they weren’t punished as moral monsters and losers, and we inherited that “special treament” that fellow white americans were willing to grant them. But it was a war for humanity. Ante ceding such a war there are crimes against humanity. The word in the US means that, so it’s best to confine it to historical purposes.
Oh, let’s not beat around the bush here - the “architectural style” in question is the style of fucking plantation mansions. There is no divorcing the architecture from slavery. It is not context-free.
That’s great that you have always known that - I didn’t until very recently. Because I was never interested enough to look up what it specifically meant - I could gather when I saw the phrase that it had something to do with the south, but that’s it. It’s not like every time an article uses the phrase “antebellum home”, it’s followed up with an explanation.
Were these articles without pictures? Because you just have to *look *at anything “antebellum” to see they weren’t exactly poor farmer’s cottages.
Now, if you’re just professing a complete ignorance of what, exactly “Pre-Civil War South” actually means, well, that’s … a take, I guess. I mean, I grew up on another complete hemisphere, and yet I’ve always known exactly what a big white mansion in the Southern United States means.
Did they never show *Roots *on TV, where you grew up? Hell, North and South, even?
I don’t recall having a mental picture of what they looked like, so I’m going to say I probably did not see many photos/pictures of houses that were described as antebellum. Although even if I had, I’m not so sure I would have known that they were specifically plantation houses rather than general “rich people’s houses” and if you tell me now that the only rich people in the pre-Civil War south were plantation owners, that will be my “new fact of the day”.
If you go back to my original post , I was responding to someone who guessed that a large percentage of the general population either didn’t have any idea what the word meant or only knew that it vaguely had something to do with the south - and I am one of them.
My answer stands. You may think of country music as some monolithic genre who’s “target audience” is redneck pro-confederate southerners. It may have been more that way in the past but not for quite awhile. Bands like the one in question here are pop oriented and sell to a wide range of people in all parts of the country. Country music purists hate it but it sells.
How you did not know this before, and yet live as an adult in the USA? The answer to that is part-and-parcel of the US’s problem, right there.
I’ll say it again - I’m half a world away, in a developing country, and yet I knew stuff like this as a kid. Not the word “antebellum”, but what the South was like.