First off, as a many generational southerner, I do feel it is past time for Confederate monuments to come down. However, as a southerner, I do take umbrage with the near consistent speak that southern pride is based in racism. I believe the for the most part southern pride is the result of being looked down upon by the rest of the country. Southern/redneck jokes are common. Ironically, we have been posed to be inferior and you wonder why southerners take offense. Most here understand the wrongs that were done, most here are still religious, but it’s not racism that causes southern pride. Sure, every racist asshole is going to fly the stars and bars, but things here are getting so much better.
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This doesn’t explain the Georgia state flag incorporating the battle flag for over 40 years.
Welcome to the boards, thedudescar.
Welcome to this place, it kicks ass, performance-wise, to the old place thanks to Tubadiva, our Admin. who days ago passed away. The thing about Northerners judging Southerners really is that god damned flag and what it really represents.
I’m not worried about southern pride that’s not based in racism. Just get rid of all the racists and you can be proud all you like.
The problem, of course, is when one guy says, “I’m not a racist, and I’m proud of my state (full of racists)!”, that earns a sideeye.
Hmmm…they still celebrate Confederate Memorial Day in South Carolina…the BMV closes. It’s a real thing. My experience here as a northern transplant is that locals can be disrespectful of “Yankees”.
I don’t think that people think that Southern pride is based on racism. Rather, Southern pride as represented by waving Confederate flags ignores the racism behind it. Especially because this didn’t end in 1865. The vast majority of white Southerners created Jim Crow laws as quickly as they could. I’m old enough to remember the Civil Rights movement, and I heard Wallace and the rest of the Southern governors be unabashedly racist, and get reelected by big margins. Some of us wonder if this might come back if some people had their way.
Contrast this to the Germans. They didn’t put up statues of Nazi generals. The site of the Hitler bunker in Berlin is a patch of dirt with no memorial, just a few hundred feet from the Holocaust museum. (Which is wonderful.) That was done specifically to keep anyone with admiration for the good old days to consider it a monument. I’m Jewish and I think the Germans are doing a wonderful job with this. When Black southerners feel the same, then the South will have gotten it done.
All parts of the country get looked down by other parts. I’m from New York and people say nasty things about us all the time. So what.
I would say that both the Confederate flag and Civil War generals have very little to do with Southern pride as they didn’t exist before 1860. They are both specific to the Civil War.
I would think you could embrace your Southern pride with less dissonance if you overlook that roughly 5 year period where Southern men abandoned their lives, farms, communities and families in order to slaughter and be slaughtered in defense of their right to enslave and oppress blacks. Stick with rocking chairs and mint juleps.
And the South lost that war, BTW. The Confederate flag is nothing more than the world’s largest participation trophy.
And further, both the pre-1956 and current state flags are, if not based on, then remarkably similar to the Stars and Bars. (Obligatory nitpickery - the “Stars and Bars” is not the blue saltire-with-white-stars-on-a-red-field that we all know from Klan meetings and Trump rallies. That’s the Battle Flag, which was specifically adopted because the Stars and Bars couldn’t be easily distinguished from Old Glory on the battlefield. Just getting the pedantry out of the way.)
[quote=“Voyager, post:7, topic:914672, full:true”]I don’t think that people think that Southern pride is based on racism. Rather, Southern pride as represented by waving Confederate flags ignores the racism behind it. Especially because this didn’t end in 1865. The vast majority of white Southerners created Jim Crow laws as quickly as they could. I’m old enough to remember the Civil Rights movement, and I heard Wallace and the rest of the Southern governors be unabashedly racist, and get reelected by big margins. Some of us wonder if this might come back if some people had their way.
Contrast this to the Germans. They didn’t put up statues of Nazi generals. The site of the Hitler bunker in Berlin is a patch of dirt with no memorial, just a few hundred feet from the Holocaust museum. (Which is wonderful.) That was done specifically to keep anyone with admiration for the good old days to consider it a monument. I’m Jewish and I think the Germans are doing a wonderful job with this. When Black southerners feel the same, then the South will have gotten it done.
All parts of the country get looked down by other parts. I’m from New York and people say nasty things about us all the time. So what.[/quote]
This.
If England had defeated the 1776 rebellion in their North American colonies, George Washington would have been hanged, along with others.
And their sure wouldn’t have been any statues of them.
I think there is more than a small nugget of truth here. It’s a little like gay pride. Why do we have gay pride and not straight pride? Because people have shit on gay people for so long. Why southern pride and not northern pride? Because people have indiscriminately shit on southerners for so long. And before you say we deserve it, remember that you’re insulting all the black people who are also southerners.
Unfortunately, shows of pride seem to require a flag. Unfortunately, the south picked the Confederate battle flag. Everything about the Confederacy (and especially that flag) is very racist and only grows more racist with time. White southerners almost always fall short in rejecting the flag and its causes, choosing to wrap it in abstractions like “states rights” or “it was a long time ago” or “actually the slaves were better off because they got free passage to America with guaranteed jobs”.
The problem isn’t with southern pride per se. The problem is that southern pride seems to require at least whitewashed or minimized southern past. Of course some don’t minimize it, many are still proud racists and slavery apologists who have no greater principle than “yankees ain’t gonna tell us what to do.”
We can maybe have some sort of workable southern pride when a black southerner explains exactly what the south has to be proud about.
And I’m from West Virginia–EVERYONE puts us down!
I am certainly “Southern” by ancestry (I was born in Chicago, more or less by accident–my Dad was in the Army at the time–but my father was born in Georgia, my mother was born in Arkansas, and they met and married in Texas; as far as I know my ancestors on both sides probably in the main were from “the South”, going back to maybe the 18th century).
But I’m not sure if a “Southern” identity, as a thing to take pride in, is salvageable. As a Georgian (even though I wasn’t born here, I’ve lived here, off and on, for most of my life) I can take some degree of pride in the place where I live. We Georgians can talk about Oglethorpe (we can adopt an attitude sort of like the Australians, “We started out as a debtor’s colony, a place for the wretched outcasts of English society, and now we are a modern and prosperous state!”); we can talk about Jimmy Carter (regardless of how you view the man’s performance in office, he rose from a very humble background to holding his country’s highest elected office, and his performance as a former POTUS is all but universally admired); we can talk about Martin Luther King (born right here in Atlanta); we can talk about our state’s many wonderful state parks and its natural beauty, or about the fine old town of Savannah, with its history and architecture.
And obviously people from, or with close ties to, other “Southern” states can find their own sources of pride: Virginians can talk about the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and the University of Virginia; and so forth.
But, to say I have pride in being a “Southerner” is to proudly claim an identity that says “I have something in common with people from Virginia, Mississippi, and arguably Texas; but not with people from Pennsylvania, Illinois, Kansas, or Colorado”. Well, what does Georgia have in common with Virginia, Mississippi, and arguably Texas; but not Pennsylvania, Illinois, Kansas, or Colorado?
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After the Revolution, the first group of states became identified as the “Slave States”, which failed to abolish slavery within their limits (even as slavery was being abolished in, or never got started in, the “Free States”).
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Those states, having failed to abolish slavery, then started a bloody war for the perpetuation of slavery.
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Having started a war for the perpetuation of slavery, they lost that war, which led to great hardship. (Even if you say “Well, they deserved to suffer, for starting that war in defense of slavery!” it’s undeniable that “the South” experienced something–total defeat in war, including, for most of “the South”, military occupation by the victors–which most of the rest of the United States–Pennsylvania, Illinois, Kansas, Colorado, and so on–have never experienced.)
So: Be a proud Georgia, or a proud Virginian, or a proud Mississippian. Be a proud American. In spite of the many dark, terrible things that have happened in the history of Georgia (or Virginia, or Mississippi), or of America, there are also things that we, as Georgians or Americans, can take pride in. But pride in a “Southern” identity? Not just objecting to unfair stereotypes, or a matter-of-fact acknowledgment of where our ancestors came from, but pride? I guess I don’t see it.
Also, they forget that the poor southerners were the ones dying for the plantation owners who mostly bought their way out of the fight and then rebuilt their fortunes on the backs of virtual debt slavery via sharecropping … I think the modern southern pride thing came about because 80 percent of the region was and still is considered poor …so a "salt of the earth " myth came about
Southerners in my view can legitimately take pride in good barbecue, crinums, southern magnolias and such.
The slowly dying out chip-on-the-shoulder attitude and historical revisionism in reference to the Civil War, “sweet tea” and insistence that Southerners-are-ultra-friendly-and-sweet-not-like-you-damn-Yankees*, not so much.
*true, this is not exclusively a Southern affectation, seeing that many Canadians are also insistent about their superior civility. In both cases it sometimes gets so over the top that you start to worry they’ll kick your ass if you don’t agree. 
Can an African-American be a Southerner? Some of the posts in this thread seem to suggest that the terms are mutually exclusive.
But “sweet tea” should be considered a crime against humanity, or at least a public health hazard.
The issue with the Confederate flag* is that it was for a long time, not a part of southern pride.
After the Civil War, most Southerners wanted to forget about it. So the signs of the Confederacy were not common. There were no statues to the generals. Most battlefields had few Confederate memorials (partly because the South was destitute and couldn’t afford them). They just wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened and move on.
But there was a surge of racism in the early 20th century, as the second incarnation of the Klan gained strength (people don’t understand how influential the Klan was in the 1920s; it was their influence that got the first laws restricting immigration passed). And that’s when most of the statues went up – the Klan wanted to remind Blacks that the South had fought to keep them slaves.
The flag is more complicated. At first, it was never seen, but it slowly was used as a way to memorialize Confederate War dead. But in 1948, that changed (though it had evolved in this direction before that): The Dixiecrat party – southern Democrats who left the party because it had adopted a civil rights plank – used it extensively as a symbol. The meaning – which older groups wanted to preserve as a memorial for the dead – became inextricably linked with Jim Crow and racism. It appeared outside of a memorial context and stayed that way.
So it’s fine to celebrate the non-slavery cultural aspects of the South, but you can do that without a flag that was revived to be the symbol of racism.
Here’s another pov. I come from Rochester, NY. That wasn’t just the home of Frederick Douglass for many years and the place from which he published his abolitionist newspaper, The North Star. Rochester was also welcoming because it was a major stop on the Underground Railroad from the 1830s on, and Douglass became a “stationmaster” here.
When we’re talking about history and heritage and what and who should be celebrated, wouldn’t you automatically expect that the places battling against slavery should look down on the places that deliberately resurrected the iconography of slavery in the 20th century in order to intimidate their black citizens?
Remember that the flags and the statures and the naming of schools all took place long after the Civil War during the Jim Crow period, when thousands of lynchings occurred, legalized segregation was blatant, and politicians competed for office on the basis of how cruel they could to the “coloreds.”
I’m well aware that the North was not innocent of these crimes and that some blacks made it clear that they almost preferred the outright bigotry of the South to the hidden bigotry of the North. “Almost” is the operative word. The South went out of its way to wage a campaign of horror from the end of Reconstruction to the days of the Civil Rights movement. Southerners have to live with that heritage as well as the heritage of actual slavery.
You had a chance to repudiate that heritage when the Democratic Party started embracing civil rights and the Republicans opened its doors wide to bigots. All that was necessary was to stay Democratic. But, no, the South deliberately chose the party that was most antagonistic to blacks, and remains enthusiastically in thrall to it to this day.
There’s no way out from this heritage. At every moment in U.S. history the South overwhelming opted of its own free will to be as evil on the race issue as it could possibly be. You want others to forget that? Tough. You earned every bit of opprobrium. It will hang onto to you as long as the perpetrators are alive. Come back in another generation or two and we’ll see what’s changed.
Most do not support the pro-slavery flag. Those that do - and my sense is there are a lot fewer of them than there were 30-40 years ago - should rightly be called out as much as the people who were okay enough with racism and sexism that they voted for Trump despite their personal beliefs.