I’ve been spending the week on Zoom calls with the North Carolina Association of Educators. We started on Monday by talking about the best thing about our region of the state. Here in WNC a lot of people said Waterfalls, or Nina Simone, or breweries. In the east, people talked about the beaches, or Wilmington downtown, or Eastern-style barbecue. In the Piedmont, they talked about NCCU, or Lexington-style barbecue, or the Greensboro sit-ins.
There’s a lot to be proud of in our state, and I assure you that if someone had come into that group and blathered about how the South stinks, they would’ve gotten the shit blessed out of their heart.
But there’s a world of difference between what we were talking about there, and the “Southern Pride” that people usually talk about under that name. The people who are thrilled about Morehead College are very rarely the people being referenced by the “Southern Pride” crowd.
To be fair, there were explicitly racist towns in the North as well. For example, towns like Darien, Connecticut didn’t allow black people in town after dark. And developments like Levittown didn’t allow leases or sales to non-whites.
[quote=Slow Moving Vehicle](Obligatory nitpickery - the “Stars and Bars” is not …)[/quote]Thank you. I was doing a potty dance reading through the thread to make sure this ground didn’t get covered before I started scorching it. I’m not sure whether or not the Flag of the Confederacy is cool either, but the battle rag certainly is in poor taste for a lot of reasons.
Regarding HMS_Irruncible’s observation about “pride”, perhaps The South would be looked down on less if there were less emphasis on it being a separate part of the nation. Almost nobody refers to The North unironically, presumably because The North was always The United States of America. The South seems only to exist as the entity that attempted to secede and wound up not being the region that wrote the history texts documenting that event.
ETA: JFC, now I gotta relearn all over how to code posts?
First of all there was slavery in the North in the early part of US history, but the North largely abolished it within feeling compelled to invent a new form of servitude in its place. And second, when “decent people” inherit an evil “enigma” they figure out a way to end it. Anything else is using the excuse of the white man’s burden. Oh, those poor oppressed white southerners! Yes, there was oppression against the poor whites, but the wealthy were large and in charge and wanted no change because they valued their money and convenience over the lives of their fellow human beings.
In other words, cowardice.
There were some genuinely decent Southern whites - but by and large they would have to leave the South to escape being part of that society. That just left a higher concentration of evil, racist crap behind that continued to oppress the hell out of anyone who wasn’t white enough in their eyes.
If you broke away from that good for you. It’s just a damn shame that the majority did not.
There’s a famous Ursula Le Guin story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” about people who have the courage to leave an unjust society. NK Jemisin recently wrote a rejoinder short story, “The Ones Who Stay and Fight.” Her thesis, broadly speaking, is that staying in an unjust society to change it takes a lot MORE courage.
Yeah, there are decent Southern whites. They gotta struggle against social conditioning that encourages them at every turn to be cowardly in the face of racism, to accept the fruits of white supremacy and racial terror.
Yes, but the difference is that this stuff wasn’t codified into law, and wasn’t nearly as pervasive as in the south. DrCube’s assertion that writing down Jim Crow laws is somehow better by being out in the open is crap. We had de facto segregation by neighborhood, sure, but not in our schools. This was in the '50s and '60s, when the Southerners were still electing racist governors by large margins.
It continued. I lived in SW Louisiana for 3 years, and when we moved to New Jersey in 1980 we suddenly realized that in the North black people went to restaurants we went to, while in the South they didn’t. No laws, just culture.
Racism by default and by companies is bad - racism enforced with the barrel of a gun is worse. A lot worse.
Personally I don’t get the regional pride thing. I come from Boston: cradle of the Revolution, and home to some kick-ass sports teams and some of the best universities in the world, but I had nothing to do with any of that. Why would I get pride out of it? Why does someone feel pride because of the accident of their birth?
