I'm reading a book called American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard, and he makes a fantastic point when talking about the Deep South that I hadn't quite considered before.

He points out that South Carolina (from which much of the Deep South got it's culture) was specifically established by younger sons of the West Barbadian slave system, a slave system that was shocking even to contemporary Englishmen. SC was established as a slave society--other places in the South relied on slaves early on, but they weren't slave societies at first, and in the rest of America they tolerated slaves but weren't slave societies either.

The thing he said that really struck me was that for basically three hundred years, from the 1670s or so to the 1970s, the Deep South had a caste system, not just a social class system.

In the Deep South there were rich white people and poor white people, and rich black people, and poor black people, but until a generation ago, a black person couldn't cross the caste line.

Black men were killed for even the hint of sleeping with a white woman. It was more acceptable for a white man to sleep with a black woman (though this became less and less acceptable), but the kids were still part of the "unclean" caste.

I thought that was an interesting, and apt, way of describing the situation in the Deep South.

The other thing he pointed out is that when it comes to cultures of a specific area, the most important thing in determining the values of that culture is the first groups of people who arrive there. The first arrivals have a huge impact on the culture of those that follow, and though some aspects might be changed, by and large anthropologists have found that later immigrants adopt the culture of those who arrived first. So since the Deep South was first settled by those younger sons of West Barbadian slave families, it's those values that inform(ed) the basis of the culture.