Thread by @jelenawoehr

In honor of these Alabama white guys, let's discuss the historical roots of the incest stereotype in the American south.

First off: yes, it's real, and in fact, researchers have been able to use DNA to figure out when (~1870-1890) it became less common.

https://twitter.com/djlavoie/status/1128489028448399360

But it's not everybody - cousin and sibling marriages were a particular habit of planters, families who owned plantations & typically used enslaved people's labor to work them.

They lived in sparsely populated areas and often socialized very little outside the family.

So, many planters married cousins or siblings because those were the people they knew.

But it was also considered a valuable way to concentrate wealth within a family - and, for planter women, a way to avoid losing the family name in marriage.

Kinship marriage was NOT practiced by enslaved people, despite hundreds of years of being held in a society that approved of it.

Even at this time, people understood that kinship marriage could cause birth defects and developmental disabilities.

There are historical records & works of fiction in this era featuring this understanding being articulated by women trying to arrange a non kinship marriage, by telling the other family that they needed outside blood to resolve weaknesses in their family line.

Today, we know that first cousin marriage in a single generation doesn't increase the risk of physical birth defects, but it triples the offspring's risk of mood disorders and doubles their risk of psychosis.

Multigenerational kinship marriage is hard to study, but likely worse.

Why did planters stop marrying their siblings and cousins?

Not because their tastes changed. Because after the Civil War, planter families were scattered, with many members moving north or west for work. Commodity prices were depressed, rendering their plantations unprofitable.

In short, where once marrying kin carried an economic benefit, now former planters needed to marry outside the family to bring money IN after losing their fortunes in the Civil War.

Their culture didn't suddenly change, economic incentives did.

Kinship marriage never became taboo in the planter class. It just became disadvantageous.

So, these guys who don't think incest is so bad today?

Likely descendants of incestuous planter marriages, who still don't think it's so bad to "keep the name in the family."

This doesn't apply to other social classes in the south, which never had the same economic and practical incentives to marry kin.

Some did (especially in very rural areas) but it wasn't a cultural custom in the same way outside the planter class.

Just another way the planters' commitment to brutal capitalism fucked over everyone around them: their marital preferences became a sweeping stereotype affecting the entire region, when really it was just planters hoarding their resources.

And they KNEW it hurt their kids.

One little footnote here: the phenomenon of cousins being raised together is sometimes cited as a cause for cousin marriage in the antebellum planter class, but in some other cultures where cousins are raised together there are strong incest taboos.

It's about resource hoarding.

And they're still resource hoarding today. Their culture is the same as it ever was.

They choose spouses, candidates, and policies based on who will help them concentrate their money within the narrowest circle possible. Avoiding sharing is their central political philosophy.