Lazarus Board

New Vedan wrote:

The result of that is that white southerners are for the most part descended from old pre revolution settlers. If you look at a map of most reported ethnicity in america (ex German,french,spanish, etc) the southeast is the only area that is still majority British american. Now if you remember the British largely stopped coming to America after the revolution, they had there own settler colonies after all. So what that means is that we are still mostly descended from the British settlers that lived here before the revolutionary war, and that we have been marrying among each other for the last 200 years. There was not a overwhelming abundance of pre revolutionary colonists, so some inbreeding became inevitable. Especially when you consider that at the time there was no stigma behind it at all, and that people did not usually travel very far so they had to marry whoever lived close enough to them.

Nowadays the south is changing somewhat. We have more immigrants and internal migrants moving in than we ever have before, and interracial relationships are no longer forbidden on Paine of death like they were in our grandfathers time. And some people have become self conscious about the inbred southerner stereotype. So its becoming more and more rare, but due to our history we still tend to be more tolerant of cousin marriages than most other areas of the united states. But close family relationships, such as siblings or parents, have always been taboo no matter what time period.