Talk:Okie

Untitled

Should we mention that most of the Okies were of mixed ethnic backround?

Why not?

well for one thing there aren't any hard statistics to back my assertion.

However since many Oklahomans at the time were Indians and the one who weren't were often hiding their mixed race backround it stands to reason many Okies were of mixed blood. grazon 01:00, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Oklahoma is one of the most Native American (Indian) populated states and no surprise they formed a large percentage of "Okies" whom came to California and for other states (major cities of the Northwest, Midwest and Northeast). Today, you may find Cherokee and Choctaw communities in California and elsewhere, whom try hard not only to completely assimilate (in which they had, but are victims of racism as a minority group), they try to keep their Native American culture alive in an urban setting. I've checked out the Oklahoma article on the percentage of blacks or African Americans and they are only 8 percent, but some deragatory comments on Okies are the mixed race underclass is a ridiculous statement, but I'm aware those things being said came from a more racially tense time like the 1930's. + Mike D 26 22:00, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

that sounds like a very 1990's interpretation of history. you seem to imply that okies were only "oppressed" because of their "race," rather than being dirt poor economic migrants. i know it can be hard to believe since it contradicts political correctness, but being "colored" is not necessarily a prerequisite for oppression. poor whites can be "oppressed" too.

and where are you getting this all oklahomans are "indians"? the sooners, settlers, etc who became the failed dust bowl farmers were "white." remember, they they took the land that was meant to be a giant reservation.

75.69.133.211 (talk) 17:30, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

As a grandson of an "okie", my grandfather was born/raised in Osage County, Oklahoma north of Tulsa in the 1920s (later to relocate to Kern County, California near the town of Arvin at age 13) when he and his family aren't born US citizens, but waited until federal law changed in 1925 to grant all American Indians (less than half Caucasian) on reservations their citizenship rights.

In the 1930s he spoke of a time when American Indians like his parents (his mom is full-blooded, his father 1/4th) are legally discriminated despite the New Deal could helped them except tribes were exempt from the program, limited to field work due to limited educational opportunities and threatened by incidents of violence by the KKK. Racism (if they were black or Indian) and classism (what poor whites faced) have affected those farm laborers to a point of desperation to leave Oklahoma and nearby states to start lives anew.

I said the "Okies" experienced levels of prejudice by Californians for being poor, rural and Southern, but they questioned a large number of them had American Indian ancestry and this puts them in a disadvantage. The "Okies" learned what it was like to be a cultural minority, and my grandpa worked in the fields aside Filipinos, Mexicans, Armenians and African Americans in the multi racial Central Valley and later he moved to Los Angeles in the outbreak of WWII, he turned 18 and signed up in the US Marines to better himself and completed his education (he dropped out in the 6th grade). + Mike D 26 (talk) 15:57, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

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Norfolk

The same person who made this edit also made this edit. I have reverted it. —Ashley Y 03:12, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

His edits are worthless and don't hold any truth, but he/she could take the edit to the Norfolk, UK article. Okie is indeed used in a positive way by many Oklahomans in the state, but the second edit meant to insult Americans in general is uncalled for. In California, some Okie descendants when they visited L.A. or San Francisco alleged to have encountered negative jokes, comments and stereotypes about their "redneck" or "white trash" heritage by the urban locals. There's a vicious canard going around that Okies are either racists (klansmen or skinheads), oil-rich capitalists, cowboy-like bible thumpers, inbred shack dwellers or gun-toting homophobes, are based on popular stereotypes of rural whites from the Southern or Central regions. I'm worried on the rise of prejudice against lower-income people from rural areas or any "red states", since it became fashionable and more acceptable to make fun of Okies instead of let's say, Gays and Jews and the disabled...and the image of a white turnip-truck right-wing hick is less controversial than to crudely depict black people in the mass media. So far, Okie is a good word but all depends on how it's used in comedy or satire, like for Jeff Foxworthy's regular standup routine is far from what the Beverly Hillbillies accused of defamation of Okies living in a wealthy community in the 1960s. It's not right to make fun of people for their race, religion, nationality, appearance or income class, but there's a whole other standard in how most people kindly use the term Okie. + Mike D 26 22:11, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Modern Usage

The term Okie has simply grown to be viewed less derogatorily. It's not that the people in Oklahoma are ignorant of its roots... I'd know, I'm from Oklahoma...--CountCrazy007 01:30, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. I've been an "Okie" (from Oklahoma) all my life. It's not an insult, it's just a diminutive. Modern informal American English favors shorter words. It's okay, don't lose any sleep over it... And by the way, responding to the "okie from Muskogee" thing below: Did you actually pay attention to the lyrics to that song? They don't seem so insulting to me. Bouncey (talk) 23:15, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Other Oklahomans would disagree with you, however, and say it's quite the opposite. User:Charlietwohats added most/all of the contributions about it, and seemed quite adamant about his experience with it. I dampened the tone he put in a bit, but I'm a Jersey boy and am largely ignorant of its actual use (and so can't speak with any sort of authority on the issue). Feel free to remove it entirely if you like; I certainly won't object. --Xanzzibar 01:47, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

I don't know where in Oklahoma CountCrazy could be from but he is very very wrong. I am from Oklahoma, live there & polled some 20 + people on this. the only ones who did NOT consider it insulting were 2 young women who moved just across the line in Texas. After the origin was explained to them they were very embarassed.

No one else would as they state ever consider using it to describe themselves. As one not-so-gentleman said. "I'll stomp your ass if you call me that!"

Saying it is is a simple derivation is like saying Nigger is just a variant of Niger (river). A few people misusing a term (deliberately?) does not excuse a reference for attempting to change meanings.

Having been in music business, I can assure you that Merle Haggard's song "okie from Muskogee" was in intent sole degrogatory and an act of his personal revenge on the town that treated him & other rural people shabbily. Just note the lyrics, they are mostly insulting.

I feel that as shown above in that discussion that if you are removing comments by people that disagree with your 1984 "newspeak" then you are dong a major disservice.

Can I remove countCrazy's demeaning remarks now? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Modern man (talk • contribs)

The famous "paradox" is a great quote, and very humourous, but it is in no way a paradox.

Easy, tiger. Wanting to remove something because you don't agree that it's accurate isn't revisionism. People delete things all the time because they dispute its veracity. This isn't any different. Different people have obviously experienced different feelings regarding the word, and so we need to work around that. Informal surveys are of no help (Wiki policy on "no original research"), and there's apparently no general consensus at the moment, so we'll need to find other resources to validate these claims. --Xanzzibar 20:39, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Whoever says Okie in comedy at this time isn't breaking a social more or unwritten rule on what term is prejudicial or offensive. But to walk up to somebody in Bakersfield, Fresno or any part of the Central valley, California and shout "you stupid okie" is what some people worry about is (once again) passively tolerated. It's not like calling black people racial slurs or in California where large Hispanic and Asian communities protested against their racial slurs "beaner", "wetback", "chink" and "gook" attacked them for many decades. The current usage of Okie fits in the category of anti-immigrant terms used in New York city or New England in the turn of the 20th century: you may heard of the terms "wop", "guinee", "mick" and "polack" lost it's edginess after the 1950's. There's now a psychological trick used by some Okies to call upper-income urbanites from L.A., Southern Cal. or the Bay Area all sorts of names: "OCies" are initials of "Orange County" since Okies is somehow a code word for "Originated-Kern county". I'm amazed on the fact lots of "yuppies" and "native Californians" have relatives such as Okies and Arkies from the Midwest and Southern states, aren't anywhere near of a "middle American" cultural persuasion. What if they drove to "Okie towns" Tulare, Madera, Salinas, Stockton, Yuba city...or the farm valleys of Santa Maria, Antelope and Imperial known for harboring large numbers of Okie migrant labor in the '30s? Would they explore their family origins/roots or try hard to avoid or ignore it out of classist/regional embarrassment?..and what does it mean in California, where millions of immigrants from Mexico, Central America, the Vietnamese, Filipinos, Armenians, and other countries had recently settled reminding us of how the Okies came to the state before them?...they had to move in order to work and survive...and some residents didn't want them there, hated them, threatened them and blamed them for local problems. It's a repeated tale told alot in the history of immigration and class struggle in America. + Mike D 26 22:24, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Modern Usage II

The veracity of the following paragraph is highly suspect to me. At the very least, any time I see a sentence beginning with "It has been said that" I think weasel words.

Being an Oklahoma native, I've been told that in actuality surprisingly few Okies ever really went west to California. Obviously, that's a poor reference so I've merely marked the paragraph as needing citations.

It has been said that some Oklahomans who stayed and lived through the Dust Bowl see the Okie migrants as being quitters who fled Oklahoma; but there is hardly a native Oklahoman who does not have some family member who made the trip. Most Oklahoma natives are as proud of their Okies who made good in California as are the Okies themselves—and of the Arkies, West Texans, and others who were cast in with them.

Bantosh (talk) 21:49, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

• I don’t know where you get your information but, per US Census Bureau population estimates, Oklahoma lost 360,000 citizens between 1931 and 1944 (from 2,403,000 in 1931 to 2,043,000 in 1944), or 14.98% of its population.[1] Oklahoma also had 618,519 births and 284,591 deaths in this same period which should have increased the population by 333,928.[2] So the actual population loss was closer to 700,000 (693,928 or 28.87 %). Decimation, by definition, is a 10% loss, so Oklahoma was more than decimated during the Dirty Thirties. This diaspora devastated Oklahoma's agriculture, industry, government, economy, and culture, and Oklahoma did not recover for many decades. Also, if you will recall, J.C. Kennedy and his Democratic cronies called the Okies quitters and much worse during the Bartlett campaign. SpudDuck (talk) 06:11, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

• • My compliments. Although looking up decimated, [3][4]it would appear that since neither 1 out of every 10 men was selected by lot and killed nor was a 10% tax levied, that by that definition Oklahoma wasn't decimated, ha ha.

Anyway, looking at the offending paragraph again, what does it have to do with "Modern Usage"? I'm removing it. Bantosh (talk) 22:45, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

I have a question in regards to the article's source #6:

^ Windschuttle, "Steinbeck's Myth of the Okies": "Unfortunately for the reputation of the author John Steinbeck, however, there is now an accumulation of sufficient historical, demographic, and climatic data about the 1930s to show that almost everything about the elaborate picture created in the novel The Grapes of Wrath is either outright false or exaggerated beyond belief." What a bunch of right-wing revisionism to deny the truth. Okies fled Oklahoma for economic reasons when their states' economies nearly collapsed in the 1930s. I read a passage on "US States information: Oklahoma" in the 1996 Universal Almanac about the large number of farm owners were "transplants from New England mostly of businessmen in the agricultural trade, returned without much economic loss" or something like the outward migration wasn't severe like it was widely reported in the news media at the time. The farm owners might not been severely affected, but farm workers had experienced a declined standard of living during the dust bowl, great depression and the US government's failure to provide proper assistance to farmers of the Great Plains and Southeast states. + Mike D 26 (talk) 16:14, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Ambiguations

In an ironic note, "Okie" is also a nickname for Okinawans coming from the island of Okinawa after world war II. It is held to be usually offensive for them and the co-related Japanese people. From 1945 to 1972, Okinawa was ruled by an U.S. Administration following Japan's surrender and was included in the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, until Okinawa was returned to Japan.

What's more interesting is the Okinawans and Japanese-Americans have been blending in with the Cherokee Indian community in California in the early half of 20th century. In the L.A. suburb of Torrance, the Cherokee-Japanese are a result of the close contact of two different yet similar in experience ethnic groups to form a new community of Asian-Americans who sometimes held Cherokee Indian tribal membership.

I'm fully aware of not all Asians are Japanese, "Okies" are Cherokee Indians and the two ethnic-national groups (Okies are US Americans) had evolved separately, but cultural anthropologists study how an ethnic group comes in contact with another to eventually merge in a generation (i.e. Jew-talians, Irish Franco-Canadiens, Nuyo-ricans as Puerto Ricans with African-American ancestry, Punjabi Mexican Americans, etc.) whenever they began to assimilate in a new land. + 71.102.7.77 (talk) 20:47, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Added to the Oklahoma Wiki Project

I am ASTOUNDED that this article had not yet been added to the Oklahoma Wiki Project! Wow! Well, that has now been fixed.

As for the pejorative use of the word "Okie," per Wiki policy, I will do some objective research and see what I can find. Since I expect to find two or more major points of view, I will present, link, note, and cite them. ProfessorPaul 02:00, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

Trivia

I disagree with the description of the Will Rogers intelligence quote as a paradox. If Oklahomans of below average intelligence (for Oklahoma) left, Oklahoma's average intelligence would rise. If these same people were more intelligent than the average Californian, then their arrival would also raise the average intelligence of California. I believe the intent of the quote was basically to say that on average, Oklahomans are more intelligent than Californians. It also implies that those who stayed in Oklahoma were more intelligent than those who left. This Okie doesn't think it's a paradox. 137.240.136.81 17:37, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Removed edit: Rural white and American Indian farmers of Oklahoma, and from the Southern and Central states had been relocating to the Northeast and west coast since the 1850s, but the "Okie" migration of the 1930s brought in over a million new displaced residents to California's Central valley and major cities bucked the trend. Whenever any edit is unsourced, this will happen...but sounds true about the history of farm laborers often moved into the urban areas throughout U.S. and world histories. 71.102.21.238 (talk) 09:43, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

well it's not true. The Indians did not relocate to west coast or Northeast. Very few people from "Southern and Central states" went to the Northeast at any time. There were not many whites leaving Oklahoma before 1920. It's just a garbled mess of mistakes,. Rjensen (talk) 10:13, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

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is this a xenophobic?

Given that this was used within the USA, could it be said that it is xenophobic with regards to internal migration, akin to saying "go back to oklahoma"?2607:F5F0:110:1:0:0:0:61 (talk) 00:40, 30 October 2020 (UTC)

First paragraph lacks any citation.

Find citations to support the claims about “Arkie” or remove the sentence. 2601:602:9A00:4D0:CC8E:C117:530D:D5E2 (talk) 05:03, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

The first paragraph is the lede, which as a summary of the rest of the article does not need sources because everything it discusses should be sourced in the rest of the article. There are occasions (many, in fact) where this is not adhered to, but it still remains that so long as a claim in the lede is discussed further down, there is no need to show the source first.

This is true in this case - the Great Depression usage section states The migrants included people from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, Colorado and New Mexico, but were all referred to as "Okies" and "Arkies." and includes a source. More could possibly be found, but it is sourced. Chaheel Riens (talk) 08:22, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

References