"Interestingly, on the map above the most concentrated cluster of racist searches
happened not in the South, but rather along the spine of the
Appalachians running from Georgia all the way up
to New York and southern Vermont."
Two points: (1) James Carville, "Between Paoli and Penn Hills, Pennsylvania is Alabama without the blacks." (2) It's not just interesting, it's readily understandable from migration patterns of Appalachians, the folk-ways analyzed in Nancy Isenberg's WHITE TRASH: THE 400-YEAR [...] HISTORY OF CLASS IN AMERICA, and James Webb's more friendly BORN FIGHTING: HOW THE SCOTS-IRISH SHAPED AMERICA, and Colin Woodard's AMERICAN NATIONS [...]. Appalachian Mountain folk were used by their, ahem, "betters" to keep the Indians out and the Blacks down, and "the old schooling sticks." Almost as important to the Powers that Were and more subtly still be, the caste system "kept in their place" poor Whites.
Bob Dylan summed it up, back in 1963: They remain pawns in the game.
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