Social Stratification in the Deep South

Now we are in the Delta, the part of Mississippi where everything seems backwards. We got a tour of the area that included many towns from Merigold to Money, but each town seemed to confront the same problem: poverty. If you drive around this area as we did, you will see fields and fields of cotton, soybeans, corn, etc. It is a beautiful area, flat and green, with side roads taking you to small towns. But in these towns you realize that nothing seems to have changed for the past 50 years. We started the day by going to see a cotton ginnery, then we toured around small towns that reminded me of those on the Native American Reservations in Arizona. The one that stands out the most in my mind was Greenwood and the area called Baptist Town. When we entered this area, all we saw was small, run down houses and old, worn down cars. We ate at a small cafe/grocery store in the neighborhood and the people were extremely welcoming. (We tried kool-aid pickles, they were interesting). Anyways, the first thing I noticed was how cheap the food is. It was also homemade and I could tell that this was the main source (if not the only) of revenue coming into this community. I immediately thought of the Native American towns because they are very similar to this one. We learned that many people do not have running water or electricity in the Delta, and this is also true on the reservation. While the houses are older in this neighborhood, most Natives live in trailers, so I felt like these two accommodations evened each other out.

Dr. Hattery talked to us about rural vs. urban poverty and how different they are because in rural poverty there is a lack of resources. I thought about Baptist Town and how it feels like rural poverty. In some ways it is rural, but it is also next door to the entire Greenwood community, which is more economically developed. On the reservation, there is not even a neighboring community with resources because nobody has those resources on this land which spans over a hundred mile radius. Both African-Americans and Native Americans are being exploited and there are many similarities and differences between the two groups. We learned today that education in these areas is very poor and that many of the schools have been on probation because of low test scores. This is also a problem on the reservation. My mom used to work at Tiis Nas Pas, a few miles from Four Corners, at an elementary school. This school had very poor test scores and the government had threatened to shut it down. This exact same thing happened at the school that LaLee’s grandchildren went to in the movie we watched. Obviously the last thing a poor area needs is a shut down school; both areas desperately need much more funding for their school system.

Another similarity between both subgroups is the tendency to eat bad food. Native Americans actually used to eat very healthy, but when they were colonized they learned to make fried foods such as fry bread and Navajo tacos. The South also has unhealthy, bad food although I am not sure about the historical context for that.

There also seems to be a loss of culture in both communities. We learned that the younger generations in the South do not know of or understand the historical importance behind the Blues music. It is only up to the elders to understand that Blues music comes from a long history of suffering. Similarly, Native Americans have lost their culture because of the colonizers, and today the younger generations do not even know their native language.

Since we have been in the Delta I have wondered how exactly these two oppressed groups come together and how they are also separate. In some ways the Native Americans have a slight advantage over the African-Americans because they have a government organization (the BIA) to help them out. On the other hand, these communities are so set apart from the rest of American civilization that they cannot even benefit from a close by community of the middle and upper classes. Because the disparities between African-Americans and whites are very obvious because they are close in proximity to each other, Native Americans’ issues are less apparent because those communities are isolated. Yet I also feel like Americans have a general awareness about the poverty on reservations, where most have no idea how impoverished the South still is.

Later in the night we went to Po’ Monkeys to listen to Blues music and dance. Every Monday night the strippers from Memphis make an appearance, so you could say that there was a diverse crowd there. There were other tourists, some locals, our entire class, and the strippers. The tourist industry surrounding the Blues music is obviously bringing in a lot of money and people to the Delta.