We’ve all heard the jokes, I’m sure.
Southerners and poor “white trash” love to marry/sleep with close relatives. It’s always good for a cheap laugh.
But how did this stereotype come about? Is/was there any factual basis for it? If so, why was it more common in those groups?
ETA: And do other countries have a similar stereotype for people from their poorest regions, or the regions commonly viewed as more backwards than the rest of the country?
Having met my current wife at a family reunion, I resent “white trash” the implication.
Because poverty is regarded as a moral failing in American Culture, and poor white people are the only unprotected group guarded by the PC crowd ?
As to other countries, I think most have — or had — a region whose people symbolised stupidity, or whatever lapse the majority wanted to project upon them, as say, with the Irish using Kerryfolk as butts for their barbed wits, but I think the incest bit is more an American thing.
Plus of course, a few centuries ago poor people couldn’t travel far, so they married in the same villages.
Socioeconomically disadvantaged rural European-Americans, if you please.
*I shouldn’t be wearing white, and you can’t afford no ring.
Say I do and kiss me quick, baby’s on its way.
*
—Dixie Chicks, “White Trash Wedding”
It appears to you to be associated with poor US Southerners, when it’s really associated with a subset who are isolated by the rural nature of the Appalachian mountains. Isolated by the geography, they develop an insular, “us vs. them” attitude, and well, that’s the source of the incest meme. Don’t know why it’s not a popular meme with other isolated mountain areas, like the US Rocky mountains. But you will notice, it’s not commonly associated with people from Texas, or Nevada, or Florida, so it’s not simply a Southern US thing.
I dunno, I’ve kind of always associated it with the Arab world, rightly or wrongly. Don’t they marry their first cousins quite frequently?
As my great-grandmother would have said, bullshit. “White trash” were the butt of derision in general,and accusations of incestous behavior in particular, long before politcal correctness was in vogue (if ever it really was).
It’s the isolated situation in the Appalachians that results in a little too many 1st cousins marrying in that region. Not such a big deal nowdays with plenty of road access to the rest of the country. But prior to interstate highways, people really didn’t have a lot of options for marriage in many places.
Sampiro posted an excellent account of inbreeding in his home county in Alabama. If you get 2nd and 3rd cousins marrying often enough, it has the same results as brother and sister marriages over the long run.
Poor people aren’t the only inbred folk. Royalty throughout Europe got the same rap but deserve it rather more. They could only marry from an ever-shrinking pool of acceptable mates. Google up Carlos II for an extreme example.
If the marriages are legal, then by definition it isn’t incest. Different cultures define incest more or less broadly, and frequently in ways that make no genetic sense. Sex between adult stepsiblings or adoptive siblings, for instance, is frequently prohibited, though it’s clearly no more risky than two random strangers coupling.
I think there has been a fair amount of cousin marriage over the years in southern culture- it’s mentioned in Gone With the Wind among the highest socioeconomic echelons (Ashley and Melody are cousins as were their parents, though the inbreeding is seen as a weakening agent). There’s also, as in my family, a lot of marriages within a small gene pool that can seem like inbreeding even if there’s no actual incest.
Example: If I marry your sister, while your daughter marries my son by a previous marriage, and my aunt was your grandpa’s second wife, and situations at least this convoluted occur in small areas, no actual inbreeding has occurred but the children from these unions will be related 8 different ways and references to your aunt who is also your cousin will make it sound a lot worse than it is.
Also, in areas where families of 10 or even 15 kids weren’t that uncommon among the original white settlers, it doesn’t take that many generations before everyone’s your cousin. This happened in Virginia as early as the 18th century. (Robert E. Lee’s mother was from a family of more than 20 children and was related by blood or marriage to Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, the Lees [before she married Lighthorse Harry] and other Virginia planter society- and Lee’s father’s was first married to his cousin.) Soon it’s almost impossible to date without dating a cousin or an outsider.
Of course they were, but no-one ever steps up to protest the white trash poor being slandered or derided, unlike a number of other groups in the USA, each of whom has interest groups or money to fund such defenders. Slander women, blacks, muslims, jews, catholics etc. and there will be an instant fuss with accusations of racism, sexism whatever. Slander the rich, and they don’t care, because they’ve got the money. Slander people as a group who live in trailer-parks or are homeless and no-one cares.
Which was rather the point.
No-one sneers at polacks nowadays, since they blended in, but as late as the 1970s Italians found it necessary to form the **Italian-American Civil Rights League **founded by Joey Columbo to protest stereotypes and slights against Italian Americans, such as the image that they and Sicilians in particular, had connections to the Mafia.
White trash don’t have that sort of money.
Geographically isolated groups intermarry to a higher percentage than groups with ease of travel. That’s a worldwide phenomenon. Most people are surprised to find that Finland is a maze of isolated villages and its population exhibits so many rare genetic diseases as a result that doctors go there to study ailments difficult to find elsewhere.
I don’t know if Europeans make jokes about Finland, though.
A good part of it goes back to the early 20th Century stuides like the Jukes and Kallikaks. These early - and highly flawed - studies tried to show a genetic background for conditions like antisocial behavior and mental retardation.
Oddly enough, neither study focused on either Appalachia (the Jukes were from New Hersey and the Kallikaks were from New York) or incest. But they were poor and white, so I guess that’s close enough.
The meme is older than that. George Orwell in one of his books (I can’t remember where) tells the story of remote mountain villages in France, at a time when the genetic consequences of inbreeding were not well understood. In these villages, a significant number of children were consequently born with cognitive disabilities. The villagers loved these children very much (as they loved all their children), but did not know why this was happening or what to do about it. All they could do was baptise them and hope that God would look after his little ones.
And so the kindly souls in the villages called their intellectually impaired children “Christians” because they had been baptised.
In French, “chretiens”.
Now morphed in English into the cruel expression “cretins”.
An irony is that most of these groups have extremely strong incest taboos when it’s closer than second cousin or so. Actual immediate family incest would probably result in total ostracism if not vigilantism.
There seems to be a similar stereotype about rural Greeks and rural Sicilians. Some American Indian tribes claimed that other tribes they didn’t like practiced it as well. The Old Testament tells the story of Lot incestuously begetting Ammon and Moab with his daughters and these men becoming the ancestors of the Israelite’s fellow semitic enemies the Ammonites and Moabites; the Lot and his daughters is peppered with plotholes (Why did they think they were the only people left if they never left their cave? If they never left the cave then what did they eat for 9 months? Once the father-daughters three way happened and they learned “Hey, the world didn’t end after all!” why the hell did they tell it? Who would let their daughters marry these boys?) which would imply it was a long-after-the-fact genealogy to their enemies.
It’s probably just an ancient and universal thing: it’s an automatic ick factor to turn people against a group that the tellers didn’t like anyway.
And of course incest does not usually result in mentally deficient children.
Cretinism is not due to inbreeding. Cretinism is caused by a dietary deficiency of the element iodine. Iodide is primarily found in the sea, so any population that lives a long way from the sea is prone to cretinism.
So this story has absolutely no bearing on inbreeding.
The duplicity of that founder has made the League a running joke.
ETA: Or is that your point and I was just whooshed?
For what it’s worth, I have objected to comments about such people on many occasions, and you would probably consider me the sort of lefty that you’re deriding.
Did the people in these French valleys actually suffer from cretinism in the specific medical sense that developed later? And even if they did, might it nonetheless have been believed at some point that inbreeding was the cause?
Hell yeah.
The first medical descriptions of Cretinism came from villages in the Alps in the 19th century. Well before that there was already a popular image of the Alps as full of villages populated by idiots, which is why doctors went there to study the phenomenon.
Any inland area is prone to cretinism. If those areas also have limited access to coastal imports due to being off the major trade routes then they are very, very prone to cretinism.
Believed? Yeah, it’s certainly possible.
But while that might explain why people thought that inbreding produced cretins, it doesn’t explain why peolpe thought that these people were inbreeding, which is what this thread is about.