About the South's glorious past

In My Humble Opinion
21

Southern whites were decent, caring people who inherited an enigma They knew in their hearts that racism was wrong, but they didn’t know how to walk away from it. Nobody dared to be the first to stand up and leave the room. Nor were they eager to retro-fix the imbalance left by the inertia of what arose as an economic, not a social issue.

My dad was a southern racist, I went to segregated schools, I marched in protest, and I was 30 in the south when civil rights became law. This is the way I saw it.

22

I sort of prefer the attitude of the East Coast, “we are assholes, but we are honest about it.” Or even the passive aggressiveness behind Minnesota Nice - where we know we aren’t actually nice, but civility is important.

23

As a southerner, I have no idea what “Southern Pride” is supposed to mean independently of racism. We have some good food, though most of that came originally from black people, so doesn’t actually fit into ‘Southern Pride’. But we don’t have things like a strong tradition of literature, or art, or music, or science - the Antebellum south wasn’t exactly driving the nation forward culturally or intellectually, and most of what has come later came from outsiders moving in and was resisted by the locals. If you don’t think that ‘Southern Pride’ is based in racism, what is it actually based on?

The fact that ‘Southern’ is fundamentally linked to ‘the states that heartily embraced slavery and fought a treasonous war to try to keep raping, torturing, murdering, and exploiting black people, then went for segregation and lynching when they were forced to give it up’ is something that just can’t be overlooked.

This is all horseshit, FYI. If they ‘knew racism was wrong’, why did they fight a war about it, or lynch innocent black people to support it, or implement and support segregation, or demand that the UK implement segregation while US troops were stationed there during WW2, or protest loudly to the point that the national guard had to be called in when ‘outsiders’ finally put a stop to segregation? None of that is the actions of people who knew racism was wrong an inherited a bad system, that’s all the actions of people who happily embraced racism and the benefits it provided them personally.

I’m not even sure what “an economic, not a social issue” is supposed to mean here - while the original motivation for coming up with modern racism and white supremacy was economic, painting black people as inferiors fit only to serve as slaves for their masters was pretty social right from the get-go, even if it was also profitable.

24

I think folks don’t think of black people when they talk down about southerners, which is its own bit of racism to unpack for sure.

25

There was a time, twenty some years ago, when I took my family on vacations to the southern US. There was good food, nice weather, ok beaches, and I could drive instead of fly.

Then one year in Hilton Head there was a “parade” of locals, mostly in pickup trucks, waving the confederate flag and yelling racial epithets in response to calls to take the confederate flag down from their capitol. That put an end to trips to Hilton Head.

The next year in Florida my kids were shocked at a few different locals casually using language they knew was wrong. A cashier in a store warned us to lock up our car, because the N*****s were really bad, as casually as someone would warn you to put your windows up because rain was coming.

Since then (roughly 20 years) I’ve vacationed outside of the US. Sure, I have to fly, but the Caribbean beaches are far nicer and the people are welcoming. The only disgusting folks we run into are other vacationing Americans, and we do what we can to avoid them.

26

Any country would be proud to have culinary and music traditions equal to those of the American South. But I don’t get the feeling either of those are being referenced in the phrase, “Southern Pride”. I think the problem is that “Southern Pride” has become code for “White Pride”.

27

I’d like to recommend somebody I follow on Facebook, named Trae Crowder. I know nothing about him, other than he posts a series of videos in which he explains Southern culture from a liberal progressive point of view. Which means they’re 75% outrage (of the racism/sexism/homophobia) and 25% appreciation (food). But they’re all well done and mostly quite witty.

28

Well, now, that’s going a bit far. I’ve already said I don’t think much of “Southern pride”, or even have much respect for the whole idea of a (white) Southern identity as something people ought to primarily identify themselves by (as opposed to things like “Mississippian” or “American”). That said, there have certain been major Southern contributions to American literature (Truman Capote, James Dickey, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Robert Penn Warren, Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, Tom Wolfe, etc.) or American music (bluegrass, country and western, and a significant part of rock and roll–not to mention jazz, unless we’re defining “Southerners” to exclusively mean “Americans from the South of mostly European ancestry”, which as others have pointed out is pretty problematic).

29

(Underlining mine)
This totally wins the thread and is really almost all anyone needs to say on the topic.

I’l add one more sentence: “… And when Black Americans feel the same, the USA will have gotten it done.”

The journey of a thousand miles won’t get done while many of us are running, not walking, in the wrong direction.

30

Yes, there are 20th century southerners who have contributed to American literature, but you’re proving my point. First off, those are all historically recent authors, none of them are from what is supposed to be the peak time of The South (the 19th century) - when people say ‘The South Will Rise Again’, I don’t think they’re referring to 20th century literature. The fact that the ‘glorious past’ only extends back to the 20th century is kind of a problem.

And second, what common literary tradition are they drawing off of and referencing and becoming vibrant because of? Truman Capote’s most famous novel doesn’t have any of what is usually considered characteristic of ‘Southern Literature’. Tennessee Williams had to move to New York City to practice his art, he couldn’t hope to become a famous playwright without completely leaving ‘The South’. Certainly, they’re all people from the south but they’re not following in a deep literary tradition, and in most cases were successful in spite of their origins, not because of the long-running glorious literary roots of the south.

Again, these are all 20th century phenomena - are we saying that the ‘glorious past’ of the South only extends back that far? And half of what you listed are from black traditions, which…

Yes, white people from the south is blatantly obviously what “Southern Pride” is referring to, and clearly is what the OP is referring to. What black people do you see waving banners with “Southern Pride” on them? How many of the “southern/redneck” jokes have black people involved, or if spoken would ever have the subjects pictured as black? If a black family’s car breaks down in the middle of nowhere in the south, and a truck stops near them, do you think that having ‘Southern Pride’ written on the pickup truck will make them feel more or less safe about the intentions of the person stopping to investigate?

Pretending that “Southern Pride” is not about white southerners, as is the idea that the South’s “glorious past” should be looked on lovingly by black people who were enslaved or subject to Jim Crow during it.

31

Speaking of the “glorious past”:

I wanna go back to Dixie
Take me back to dear ol’ Dixie
That’s the only li’l ol’ place for li’l ol’ me
Ol’ times there are not forgotten
Whuppin’ slaves and sellin’ cotton
And waitin’ for the Robert E. Lee
(It was never there on time)
I’ll go back to the Swanee
Where pellagra makes you scrawny
And the honeysuckle clutters up the vine
I really am a-fixin’
To go home and start a-mixin’

Down below that Mason-Dixon line

  • Tom Lehrer
32

Yeah totally! I’ve been following him for a while and caught one of his live shows here in Cleveland. That guy is FULL of Sourthern Pride and is extremely liberal. And anti-racist.
He shows you do not have to be racist to have Southern Pride. Y’all have a lot to be proud of! Just don’t show your pride by waving the flag of racism!

33

538 just did an article about exactly that. Interesting read. Most statues were erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

34

To tie this to the Trae Crowder comment above: in his video about confederate statues, he points out that among their other faults they’re just bad art (specifically mentioning the awful Nathan Bedford Forrest.) because no reputable artist wanted to take these commissions … so they wound up (in Crowder’s words) being done by the Beginning Ceramics class at Biloxi Community College.

35

Pantastic wrote: “If a black family’s car breaks down in the middle of nowhere in the south, and a truck stops near them, do you think that having ‘Southern Pride’ written on the pickup truck will make them feel more or less safe about the intentions of the person stopping to investigate?” I don’t know about the rest of the South and certainly there will be exceptions, but in Arkansas here is how that scenario would most likely unfold: The occupants of truck would make every effort to repair the broken down car including calling their mechanic friends if necessary. If that fails, they would ensure that the car was somehow towed to a repair shop. They would refuse any compensation other than maybe a “thank you.” Furthermore, if the black family had small children with them the truck occupants would probably do whatever they could to see that the children had sufficient water and food and were being kept cool or warm depending on the conditions.

Why would the truck occupants do this? Because their “Southern Pride” demands it. They would see it as their duty as a Southerner to assist any traveler in distress.

I do not have any insight on how the black family would feel about the printed words “Southern Pride.”

If any posters with knowledge about Arkansas would wish to refute or confirm this, I would love to see their responses.

36

To follow up on my previous post I just wanted to add that the occupants of the “Southern Pride” truck, even if they were also African-American themselves, might say among themselves after it was all over something like, “Stupid n*****s would’ve froze to death if it weren’t for us.”

37

This is a nice fairy tale, but none of my black friends would like to bet their life on things working out in such an idyllic fashion.

How do you square this peaceful “Southern Pride” with Arkansas’s history of lynchings:

Or the need for the ‘Green Book’ to travel there:
http://www.arkansasheritage.com/blog/the-green-book-in-arkansas

If that’s not part of the ‘glorious past’, how shortly back does the ‘glorious past’ for Southern Pride in Arkansas go?

And that clearly means that you think Arkansas is extremely different from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina - but if South Carolina doesn’t get included, is it really even ‘southern pride’?

38

Sometimes you try to refute what someone says, and sometimes they do a better job of it than you could. Sounds like you’re N-bombs are part of ‘Southern Pride’, which is… not entirely untrue.

39

It astounds me that someone could think that the South doesn’t have an impressive history of food, music, art and literature to be proud of. Most of that only goes back to the early 20th Century only because we don’t have good records before then. Slaves didn’t write cookbooks or musical scores, but they made great food and music with what they had anyway, and passed it on to their children, who passed it on to the people alive today. Sure, there’s plenty of racist literature and minstrel shows to be ashamed of too. But that doesn’t mean everything associated with the South is racist.

Two of our nations greatest founding fathers, Washington and Jefferson, were Southerners. Yeah, they owned slaves too. That’s sort of the Southern position in a nutshell isn’t it? “Great men who accomplished great things and were part of a great culture, but admittedly, there’s a lot of horrific slavery and racism mixed in there as well”. My family is from the South, though I’ve spent most of my life in the North. I sympathize with their position. It is hard to separate Southern pride from White pride. But it must be done. When you look at history or even the present day, those sins are unavoidable. Pretending that it never happened, or that racism doesn’t exist any more, won’t cut it.

One of my favorite modern songwriters, Jason Isbell, struggles with his Southern identity in a lot of his songs. He’s just carrying on the tradition of many previous Southern artists doing the same thing.

I think it’s important to remember two things: First, the majority of African Americans live in the South, and the majority of African Americans who don’t are only one or two generations removed from someone who did. African American culture is Southern culture. It isn’t separate from it. Secondly, the rest of the country was just as racist as the South, both historically, and today. Rodney King was in California. George Floyd was in Minneapolis. The state with the most lynchings is Indiana.

The main difference is the South always codified their racism in writing. Black people were inferior by law. Slavery was written into their State constitutions. Jim Crow laws were explicitly written down and passed by legislators. All that was very shitty, make no mistake, but it was out in the open. A black man in Mississippi knew where he stood. It wasn’t a good position, but it was known. A black man in Ohio could be treated like everybody’s pal one minute, and strung up by a mob the next. So racism up North has always been more insidious, mostly because Northerners are raised to believe they aren’t racist. The South is racist, they say, and so whatever Northerners do isn’t racist by definition, because they aren’t Southerners.

So really this struggle with racism in our past, and what is worth being proud of and what we should be ashamed of, is an American problem we all should be dealing with, not just a Southern problem. But yeah, fuck that flag. It’s the flag of the Klan and Jim Crow, not the flag of the South, and it belongs in the trash.

40

I accept this friendly amendment. We need to remember that we all need to worry about this, no matter where we live.