Nope.
The Dukes of Hazzard aired from 1979 to 1985. I’m not sure what would have prevented a protest then if anyone thought it worthy of protest. They didn’t. Attitudes about the flag have evolved. Can’t we just admit that much?
As for whether or not 70s TV and movies were racist, feel free to start another thread. I might even join you. I just don’t feel like getting into an extended hijack on that subject here.
This gripe about how people supposedly didn’t fuss about a problem once upon a time so it’s illegitimate to complain now, makes no sense to me.
It’s the same point raised repeatedly by defenders of smoking in enclosed public spaces. “Gee, you didn’t have a problem with it before, why are you being mean to us now? You just want to control us, blah blah blah.”
Actually, people have had a problem with these behaviors for a long time; it’s only more recently that they’ve decided not to tolerate them.
As for the chip-on-the-shoulder sense of Southern exclusiveness (which continues to slowly die as new generations appear and migration into the South dilutes the original “stock”), that has a lot to do with Civil War memories and resentment of Northerners/outsiders, far more than simply a shared sense of what’s good to eat/values/whatever. If it’s a matter of claiming credit for barbecue (excepting that vinegar-drenched Carolina mess), have at it. What’s always been the most comical are those Exponents of Southern Culture who are always telling us about how graciousness and neighborliness are developed to a uniquely high degree (if not exclusive to) the South. They’re so insistent on claiming how vastly more gracious they are than the rest of us, it must be true. :dubious:
::shrug:: I didn’t say it’s not “legitimate” to complain now, whatever that means.
What I did say is that perceptions the flag have changed over the past 35 or so years, which is, I think, demonstrably true. The point of that observation is that your perception of the flag may be that the flag is a symbol of racism and hatred. (Probably the most common current perception.) But meanwhile, the person displaying the flag may still be holding to the formerly common meaning of the flag as a symbol of either a) the South or b) a generalized rebelliousness. Should such a person be aware that the flag will be perceived otherwise? Yeah, I’d say so.
Maybe they just wrote it in their diaries back in the day? In big bold letters?
Super, someone else has come along from (where? Ohio I think?) to tell us how Southerners think and how they perceive their culture. Please, tell us more.
Here we actually agree. In my experience, Southerners aren’t particularly more gracious than anybody else. (They are more likely to converse with strangers out of the blue, which is why Southerners are sometimes perceived as being more friendly, I imagine.)
Then why even bother to bring up your view that displaying the Confederate flag was simply dandy back in the '70s? The implication clearly is that it’s somehow illegitimate and/or hypocritical to resist it now.
Awareness is just the first step. Not stirring up resentment and potential violence through unnecessary, in-your-face public displays of the Confederate flag should be the outcome of such awareness, though this has been slow to take root among diehards.
Actually, some made it quite public, even if Southern leaders of the time weren’t very receptive to change.
“Early in 1988, almost 125 years after the Confederacy lost the Civil War, Alabamians tuned in to television news coverage of Alabama Governor Guy Hunt arresting 13 black legislators as they attempted to scale a fence and remove the Confederate battle flag from the capitol flagpole…In the early
1960s, Governor George Wallace had ordered that the Confederate battle flag be flown above the capitol as an act of defiance against an upcoming visit to Alabama by U.S. Attorney GeneralRobert F. Kennedy. The placement of the Confederate flag above both the American and Alabama flags generated little controversy within Alabama at that time, as blacks there were effectively disenfranchised, with only a small number of their ranks registered to vote…After the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, larger numbers of black Alabamians registered, and several were elected to the state legislature. One, Alvin Holmes of Montgomery, declared in the mid-1970s that it was inappropriate to place the Confederate banner above the American flag. An outspoken advocate, Representative Holmes became a strong proponent of flying the Confederate colors lower than the American flag on the capitol flagpole. Over the many months that Holmes maintained a high profile on this issue, Governor Wallace mildly rebuffed him, but mostly ignored him.”
You don’t have any problem speaking for the entire disparate region of the South. :dubious:
I’ve spent a good chunk of my adult life (more than ten years) living in the South, which while not making me an expert on Southern attitudes has exposed me to the belligerent, clinging-to-the-degenerate-past-for-dear-life views of would-be Southern apologists and boosters.
Ah, Jane Goodall among the chimps! Watch out for flying poo!
OK, so if it’s really necessary to have some symbol for the non-racist part of the overall culture of the South as a whole, and grits are the evidence for the existence of said culture, then isn’t the answer obvious? The symbol you want isn’t the Confederate battle flag; it’s grits! Nobody will get offended if you put a bumper sticker of a plate of grits on your car, and it’d convey exactly the message that you’re trying to convey.
Well sure they wouldn’t get offended now. But 30 years from now they would tell us they were offended all along.
Why should we admit it when your evidence consists of blatantly inaccurate assertions about the US film and TV industries. And now we have additional evidence in this thread your assertion that nobody protested the flag during this period is false, since Jackmanii has provided you with a cite about at least one protest (albeit not related to the US film and TV industry).
I’ll also note that while you have no problem making clearly erroneous statements about a subject you don’t seem to have studied–the history of US film and TV, you seem to have no problem dismissing other viewpoints simply because the people holding them currently live in LA in Ohio. And if you think doing a critical studies major is the equivalent of taking one college class, that is just further evidence that you really are completely unfamiliar with this area of study.
I seem to remember studying 70s TV quite astutely, in front of my TV, on weeknights in the 70s. 
On weekends, I studied 70s film.
Now it’s true, I didn’t do a deconstruction of Happy Days for my dissertation, but I like to think I know a little something about the subject.
You get props on the use of simple tools.
The mutual grooming needs work, though.
Come on, dude, that’s only a study of your personal preferences and personal choices about what shows to watch. Watching TV shows and movies doesn’t tell you anything about the structure of the entertainment industry, who the decisions makers were and how things were greenlit for production, how advertising decisions were made, or what hiring and firing practices were. It doesn’t tell you anything about overarching genres and how they were responded to in general society or by various minority groups. All it tells you is whether or not you liked Happy Days after Fonzie did his shark jump.
Perhaps you are right. Maybe I was lax in my studies. If I had known all those things then surely I would be just as outraged as you about that damned flag on the General Lee.
But hey, cut me some slack. There was only so much analysis I could do on a Tandy TRS-80 with no internet connection.
Ok, fine. I’m not going to respond anymore. You are completely unwilling to acknowledge that your posts have been incorrect about a topic you haven’t studied. But, what you’ve done here is to manage to convince me that the flag is indeed racist, whereas before I had mixed views about it. So, congrats for that.
…and thus were my dreams of a career in PR shattered.
Regarding black culture and southern culture, I think to a large degree black culture is southern culture and vice versa.
Example: Here if I get a craving for fried catfish or smothered pork chops or collard greens or other such folk fare, I can think of several restaurants that offer it (though not nearly as many as there used to be- sigh- frigging chain places). If I were in New York City or Chicago (which admittedly was founded by a black guy but he was Haitian so that doesn’t really count) or San Francisco and I got a craving for those foods the best bet would be to look under “soul food” in the yellow pages. If I were in Detroit or D.C. I’d probably find several places. What’s called soul food outside the south is just called ‘down home food’ in the south.
Black southerners started (weren’t the only contributors to by any means, but definitely were the founders of) the Blues, R&B, gospel, rock, and occupy spaces in the ancestry of country and alternative.
African Americans are a bit like the Jews (no Sammy Davis Jr. reference intended) in that they take their culture with them. The Scots-Irish and English and Irish-Irish and Scots-Scots (kind of like saying chicken-fried-chicken but a distinction nonetheless) influenced the traditions and clannishness (note the C, not the K of that spelling) of Southern society but mostly they assimilated into an amalgam. Certainly not all white southerners are homogeneous, but there are some values and attitudes that are found in most Venn Diagrams of southern cliques, black and white, and identity as southern trumps and for centuries has trumped European identities.
A difference comes when white people leave the south. Within a generation their kids were usually “Yankees” or “Midwesterners” or Californians or whatever with notions of where their roots are generally lost altogether. Diogenes is from Louisiana IIRC but his kids probably have no identity as southerners. I’m always amazed however at how many black families- especially those in Detroit and the northern metropolises- keep close ties to the south. In most white families I know the kids will know their grandparents and visit them occasionally after leaving the region, but the cousins and aunts and uncles are people you get Christmas cards from if that, whereas I know several black southerners whose family members split off in the 1930s and 1940s for the north and their descendants still know each other! (I’m amazed at this- in my family if you move 40 miles away you’re spoken of as if you died in 1958.)
So much of black culture really does stem from the South even among some families that left here generations ago. I’ve no doubt there are exceptions- I’ve known black “valley girl” and “surfer dude” types for example- but to a large degree they carried the south with them when they left.
On an unrelated topic, a book recommend:* Journey Toward Justice: Juliette Hampton Morgan and the Montgomery Bus Boycott *by Mary Stanton. Juliette Morganwas a white patrician southerner (a descendant of Wade Hampton, whose immediate family owned more than 4,000 slaves at the outbreak of the Civil War) who became a librarian in Montgomery and was one of the most outspoken white supporters of the Civil Rights movement. She lacked the money of some of the famous white liberals (Henrietta Maguire for example) or the political protection of people like Clifford and Virginia Durr, so she had to bear the full backlash of supporting Rosa Parks and MLK, and that backlash was swift and brutal. It’s a fascinating read that does much to answer the questions of why people who knew the Civil Rights movement was right still didn’t speak out for it, and while you praise Morgan (who wasn’t an angel and had some baggage) you have to seriously wonder if you’d have been that brave.
This isn’t appropriate for this forum and the sneering is not helping your argument. If you can’t make your point without making snide comments, you need to open a thread in the Pit.
I agree, and I apologize again for the remark.
Jack, I know the kind of person you are talking about. But when you say “would be Southern apologists and boosters,” aren’t you talking about Confederate apologists and boosters instead of Southern? Didn’t you meet any Southerners who weren’t belligerent?
And what degenerate past were the people you met clinging to? Are you talking about older people who remembered Jim Crow days? People who are interested in the history of the Civil War? Battle Reenactors? People who pretend they know something about the history of the period and use that as an excuse for bigotry? I can’t automatically know what lens you are using to view us.
Did you meet any Southerners who were pleasant even though they were interested in history?
Did any of us at SDMB claim that Southerners are more “gracious”? (I am just keeping my fingers crossed that I didn’t use that word myself in one of my fits.) If I did, I really should have said friendly.
I suspect that you and have would dislike the same sort of people – that is, unless you would lump us altogether and think we are all alike or try to shame us for loving our own culture and traditions.
Even Odysseus loved home above all else.
I’m aware of that. I just find it amusing that people who want to show their patriotism use such a symbol – which was actually anti-American.
It was only “American” in the sense of being a part of the North American continent.
Nice catch on the irony.
And those “types” don’t have a monopoly on being patriotic. I just hate it when people associate patriotism with that kind of troublemaker.
When war protesters clashed with war supporters in a march, I saw a man carrying a good-sized American flag on a pole use it to hit someone on the head. I’m sure he thought he was being patriotic and the young man he clobbered probably felt the same way too.