The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture :: United States History Johnny Cash Essays

The discolour Scourge Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture On his 2000 studio album, American III, Johnny change sang in a resigned voice, I got a crib full of corn, and a turnin plow/ But the grounds to crocked for the hopper now/ Got a cultivator and a double corner/ A leather line for the hull and gee/ Let the hollo roll and the lighting flash/ Im doing alright for Country Trash.* Raised on a cotton elicit in Dyess, Arkansas, Cash articulated a racialized physique divide not simply among whites and African Americans, but among whites, themselves. Cash belonged to a growing class of impoverished white farmers increasingly referred to by his contemporaries as white trash, and recast by historian Neil Foley as The White Scourge. In his book of the same title, Foley analyzes the impact of class and cannonball along consciousness on white tenants and sh atomic number 18croppers in central Texas as they competed for farm labor with both African Americans and Mexicans from 1820 to 1940. Foley asserts, The emergence of a rural class of white trash made whites conscious of themselves as a racial group and alarming that if they fell to the bottom, they would lose the racial privileges that came with being accepted for what they were not-black, Mexican, or international born.(7)** The white scourge, the masses of impoverished whites held in limbo amongst privilege and denial, Foley asserts, is what informs race relations today. The heart of Foleys argument rests on an abbreviation of the intersection of race and economics or class. Indeed the two are joined at the hip, race being created and sustained out of contest for labor.On June 23, 1845, the Republic of Texas was annexed to the U.S. as a slave state. Foley notes the annexation of Texas as a slave statebecame the great white hope of blue expansionists anxious to emancipate the nation from blacks, who, it was hoped, would find a home among the equivalent population of col ored races in Mexico.(20) But rather than uniting as similar races, discord between poor whites, African Americans and Mexicans resulted from competition for farmland as either tenant farmers or sharecroppers. Foley argues that prior to the Civil War, there was a sharp line delineating tenant farmers and sharecroppers. Tenant farmers were almost always white, own their own tools and rented land for a third of the cotton and a tail of the grain harvested.