I blame it all on The Proclaimers. The devil’s music!
Having grown up in the coal-cornbread-and-copperheads heart of Appalachia, I read the OP’s list of defining S/I characteristics with considerable interest, and a certain head-shaking dismay that these kinds of stereotypes still have some currency. Then I counted 'em up – and, lo! no less than thirteen items from said list either presently apply to me, or did so in my past (no, I don’t plan on revealing which ones), and three more of them could be said of at least one of my near kin.
Taken at face value, the OP raises a fair question, but it’s the sort of question that, if asked about any other conceivable ethnic group, would result in screaming denunciations from diverse directions. It’s the rough equivalent of asking “What’s up with the Gypsies - I heard they steal, have psychic powers, and don’t bathe?”. Or “What’s up with the Jews - I heard they’re all rich and that they secretly control the world economy?”
Half S-I here. Yes, the S-I have some identifiable traits that were vital 300 years ago but counterproductive today. I think geographic isolation caused these traits, formerly found in many groups that lived in disputed regions, to be retained to a greater degree than in other areas. You really have to drive through, say, southern West Virginia to appreciate how difficult it is to get from Point A to Point B, even today.
There is a decent admixture of German in what people think of as rednecks - for example, Chuck Yeager. Germans in other parts of the country, like the Upper Midwest, are culturally very different from rednecks. The Appalachian Germans seem to have assimilated to the dominant S-I culture, or they retained their old ways due to isolation, whereas the Midwestern Germans tended to become more modernized.
The S-I are too individualistic to demand group recognition or group rights the way other groups have. Most don’t identify with any ethnicity at all - see this map showing how people in the heavily S-I areas identify their ethnicity as plain old “American”. They’ll never be able to compete politically with the “hyphenated Americans”.
I read Sowell’s “Black Rednecks” book and it was interesting but I thought he missed a few important points. First, he says that blacks learned some of their “bad behaviors” from poor Southern whites, but most blacks lived in the coastal South or the Delta, not in Appalachia. So if blacks were influenced by poor whites, it was the lower classes in places like the coastal Carolinas. I don’t know what the word for that group is, but it’s not rednecks. Also, Sowell didn’t address the large difference in the violent crime rate between white areas and black areas in the South.
Hmmm. Is this truly a serious question? My ancestors came over at various times, depending on which side of the family we’re considering. My father’s family has been here since Rhode Island was “founded”. My mother’s were those self same Scots-Irish immigrants the OP mentions and they settled in what was then VA (now WV) and moved on to Kentucky when VA got too crowded. They were generally poor mountain folk (although one did own 2 slaves) and/or farmers. By the turn of the last century, they had moved out of the mountains and into a small city in KY and even (gasp!) started going to college and not marrying their sisters. :rolleyes: Come to think of it, I am partial to fiddle music and I like to defy authority. <insert more eye rolls here>
Scots-Irish ancestry is nothing to be ashamed of*, no matter if you are still living in a holler or have moved to LA and only share a name with those remote Appalachian cousins. There are definite Scots-Irish roots in rural Appalachia, but the poverty there is not due to the inhabitants being of that stock. I thought it was well established that the cycle of poverty was due more to circumstance, isolation and culture than ethnicity/race, but apparently not.
I have to say that if this “question” was about any other ethnic group, it would be (rightly) called racist.
*this begs the question: what ancestry is something to be ashamed of? But that’s another thread.
I’ve read someone who claimed that a decent sized segment of the “Scots-Irish” who settled in Applachia were actually Irish Catholics who, winding up in a country without Catholic priests, joined Protestant denominations.
That part is true of some of my Murphy ancestors whe lived in Appalachia. Around the turn of the last century they owned and operated a paving business with several wagons and teams of mules. Family lore has it that they chained black employees to the wagon wheels at night to ensure they wouldn’t go off drinking and end up lynched by the locals. My branch of the family moved to St. Louis where many suffered from alcoholism.
Some maintained the “drunk Irish” sterotype, although a few managed to make comfortable livings in white collar fields like insurance.
Not saying it never happened, but I would need an authoritative cite before accepting the “decent-sized segment” claim.
Just a point of reference; My father’s family is of Scots-Irish extraction, and some (not a lot) of the OP list applied to our family - Three generations back. Look at us in the last two generations, and you’d see none of that - Origin/ancestry are NOT destiny.
To be fair, the Post is not getting a lot of sympathy here.
But nowhere near the vitriol it would get, if it were about a minority. Then again, the query is just plain stupid, so perhaps the obvious wrongness of it is making it not worth the bother for most folks. 
Well don’t feel bad. I scored a hit on eleven of them, and my ancestry is mostly English and German.
Right, which is why I posted, hoping that someone could either confirm the story or rebut it.
If you consider what archaeologists say, unless they’ve changed their minds since the last time I heard one, we’re all immigrants, including the so-called Native Americans. So which group gets to be Top Dog in the Least Undesirable Immigrant category? Surely not Pennsylvanians.
Heh. For what it’s worth, I’m Scots-Irish and the only hits I got on the whole list were “living in the South” (assuming Texas counts) and “liking Johnny Cash.”
Well, to be fair, this is GQ, and we’re not supposed to go very far at all in the vitriol department, here. 
As long as we’re talking stereotypes, let’s not forget the positives: we’re great shots. We can claim Lieutenant Audie Murphy and Sergeant Alvin York!
:smack:
Ya dun yerself proud in the Pit thread, little missy!
One of the problems with the stereotype is defining Scots-Irish differently from Scottish, Irish, English, Anglo-Saxon, etc. to come up with some explanation that the Appalachian folk were different from the Irish who went to Boston or the English who went to South Carolina is, at best, working backwards from a conclusion.
The truth is that of the huge number of English-speaking immigrants who came to America in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries, a significiant number of them were poor, ended up in areas that no one else wanted and got by-passed by the general migration.