Is "Southern Culture" inherently racist?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

In the 70s and the 80s the south was where we vacationed. We’d go to South Carolina, Florida, and especially Hilton Head with several other couples. There were some racially shitty things but we were able to write it off, as “well, that’s the south”.

Then in the early 90s we were in Hilton Head having a great time. We were at a Piggly Wiggly picking up necessities when we heard a commotion outside. We went out to the road and there was a “parade” of pickup trucks with confederate flags, demonstrating against people wanting the flag gone from the state capital IIRC.

The flags were one thing, the people in the trucks yelling for the (n word) to get out was an entirely different thing. We were shocked, and had to explain to the kids about bad people.

That was the last time any of us ventured anywhere into the southern US. Since then I’ve stuck mostly to the Caribbean. One of the other couples has explored “the west” and one of the couples got all into Alaska.

Two years ago I went to Florida to attend my son’s beach wedding. I flew down, went to the wedding, then flew back.

To me, that about wraps up “Southern Culture”.

42

I am dubious about any “cultures” that fervently insist they have superior qualities when that insistence contradicts the claims they make.

You get the sense that some Southerners want to whip your ass if you don’t concede how super-friendly they are compared to everyone else. Likewise, “nice” Canadians.

The idea that the Boston Celtics are a team for white people makes no more sense now than it did decades ago.

"The Celtics were the first NBA franchise to draft an African-American player – Chuck Cooper in 1950. They became the first NBA team to send an all-black starting lineup onto the floor. The man responsible was the same guy who put together the Celtics teams of the 1980s: Red Auerbach…

“The Celtics made (Bill) Russell the league’s first black head coach. To date, only four black coaches have won a championship, and two of them were Celtics: Russell and K.C. Jones.”

43

I think it’s OK to keep eating your favorite foods and talking with an accent, especially if it’s your natural speech, as in, you’d have to re-educate to get rid of that twang. As to being “proud” of something. Do you have to brag about it to enjoy it?

Culture is a lot more than the Five F’s (food, fashion, festivals, flags, famous people). I think every culture has its problematic aspects and we can discard those with care. That takes work. Not everyone in the culture will agree with you. But you are as much a representative of that culture as they are.

Cultures also have myths. Every culture has them. They tell us who we are, essentially, as members of that culture. Nonconforming members of a culture have always had to re-define themselves and their cultures of origins, re-discover new threads that will allow them a greater measure of acceptance.

At this point, everyone who’s not actually from the South has now equated all of Southern culture with the single word “racism”. There’s a push to take away all the beloved myths of the White South (the gallant “lost cause”) and replace those stories with… nothing. This is a big mistake, but those myths can’t be foisted on people by outsiders. Someone from within that culture has to create a new image of a “New South” that focuses on those aspects, and historical figures, who resisted the norms or who were representative of something other than those norms.

There are already multiple Southern cultures. Nobody says that Black Southerners are “racist” or that their culture is “racist”, or that they’re racist for just existing. In this New South vision I’m throwing out there… what is the vision for including, or relating, to all the people who live in an area?

So the “New South” could include liberals who are very Southern in their accent, their food, but who are absolutely committed to progressive values… and who also have thought out for themselves how to express those values, they’re not just taking direction from carpetbaggers and know-it-alls from other states.

You can also choose the values that you want to embody and uphold in your personal conduct. You can extend those values and apply them in a more inclusive way. Southern hospitality extended to all, Southern good manners without the hypocrisy, whatever seems “Southern” that you really are proud of. You don’t have to brag, just embody the trait. And be honest about your family past, know the facts. You don’t have to broadcast those facts unless it’s important in the context of something else.

OP mentioned antebellum architecture. Can’t “embody” that. I like it, too, but can’t really imagine myself living on one of those plantation mansions, can’t even imagine re-purposing one of those buildings into anything other than a museum. I wouldn’t get married in one, or host a party there, because they are such a powerful status symbol of the past.

44

Certainly not. I’m not from the South, for instance, and if you’ll scroll up a bit, you’ll see that there are a lot of aspects of Southern culture that I don’t consider racist at all, and enthusiastically approve of.

Rather, it’s mostly the people who ARE from the South who are equating Southern culture with racism. “What, we can’t get rid of our flag of treason and our statues of traitors! That’s our culture!”.

45

Besides food, which is always regional, I wonder what people from the South characterize as classic (as opposed to modern) “Northern Culture”?

46

That’s great. Modern New Yorkers supported stop & frisk and in 2021 they still have a segregation problem in their public schools. In 1985 the Philadelphia police department thought it would be a good idea to drop a bomb in the middle of their city to end a standoff with members of MOVE killing 11 people and destroying more than 60 homes in the process. Can you take a guess as to what color skin most members of MOVE had? And to make matters worse, the state ended up keeping the bones of two of the children killed at the Pennsylvania University Museum of Archeology and Anthropology and using them for educational purposes without informing the families or asking for permission. And I suppose we could cover the many instances of racial problems in places like Los Angeles but who has time for that?

It’s completely fair to criticize the South for their culture of white supremacy. But in many ways the South acts as a lightning rod attracting the attention from people in other regions who then ignore their own problems. If there’s nothing to celebrate about Southern culture because it’s inherently racist then I submit the same is true of other regions of the country as well.

47

That’s not true. @Horatius has it more accurate- White Southern culture and Black Southern culture are far more intertwined and similar than a lot of people assume, and it’s not derived from one or the other.

Keep in mind that the South has never been a place of strictly rich white people and poor slaves or their descendants. There have always been a LOT of poor white people as well, and in large part poor people at the same stuff, regardless of the color of their skin. Cornbread, greens, and so on. I remember hearing about what “soul food” was, and thinking “I wonder what my grandmother would think if someone told her she was cooking soul food?”

What there is though, is a sort of postbellum Southern White culture that is derived from, or imitating that plantation culture, in that there’s a lot of formality, and a certain insistence on being proper, and dressing and acting a certain way, and moving in the ‘right’ social circles. And there are different circles within white people; there might have been middle-class people acting that way in Birmingham, and they were certainly not mixing with white trash or black people. But the people having debutante balls weren’t interacting with the middle class people either, and had a more formal, more wealth-forward way of doing their version of it. The higher up you go, the more formality and wealth there is, and more display as well.

Basically it was/is almost a caste system, if it wasn’t one outright, and black people were the lowest caste. (go read Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste” for more)

So not necessarily actively racist, as more caste-conscious than anything else- equal rights for black people means that they’re effectively breaking that system, which people resist like hell, even if they don’t necessarily have anything specific against black people.

But there’s a lot of Southern Culture that’s more generic than all that, and is shared across color/caste lines- food, hospitality, a certain public politeness, and so on. That stuff isn’t racist, even if the caste system part may be.

48

Absolutely true that other regions get way too much of a pass on their historical and persistent racism.

Complicating the issue further, though, is the fact that racism in the rest of the country was nurtured by white southern intransigence about race in the post-Reconstruction years. Like a lot of today’s covidiots, they defiantly did all they could to spread the plague, and then when blamed for the consequences whined that they weren’t the only ones responsible.

49

Politeness is not a part of Southern culture, despite what Southerners might claim. When even “bless your heart” can be taken as a deathly insult, there’s no shred of politeness left at all in your culture.

There are, of course, polite people in the South. But they’re in defiance of their culture, not in accord with it.

50

More New Yorkers opposed it than supported it (50% vs 45 % in 2012)

And … 1985? Current, much? But reach for whatever whataboutery you feel you need to, I’m out.

51

I don’t believe that the characterization “replace those stories with… nothing” is entirely accurate. Look to things like the 1619 Project, which seeks to re-cast history in terms of the contributions made by slaves to the building of the United States. Want something to be proud of? How about the countless number of slaves who made great contributions to the culture, in spite of the explicitly oppressive system they were forced to live with? I think a slave taking pride in their efforts to perfect a recipe, or build a house that stands the test of time, is a testament to the perseverance of the human spirit in the face of adversity.

And those stories as as much a part of “The South” as any stories about Stonewall Jackson, or other people made into statues.

52

I mean, depends how you’re defining the term? Most people think of “politeness” as illustrated by, say, the difference between “Excuse me, ma’am, I sure am sorry to bother you, but could you kindly nudge over your shopping cart just a bit so I can get by?” and “Hey lady, are you going to stand there blocking the aisle all day?”

It’s that difference in surface courtesy level that I think Southerners pride themselves on when they speak of being more “polite” than Northerners, even if at some level both versions merely mean “MOVE, BITCH”.

53

You sound like those people who say that slavery, redlining, and segregation were in the past so they don’t matter now. I’ve pointed out it’s perfectly acceptable to criticize the South for their white supremacy so I don’t know where this whataboutery bullshit is coming from. But, hey, whatever helps you sleep better at night.

54

Or, as I once overheard in a farmers market in Nova Scotia…: “Haul it in there Mrs. MacDonald!”

55

I don’t think all of Southern culture is inherently racist, I think many ways it is glorified have anywhere from a “tinge” of racism to “full blown racism” tied up with it. Like if you ever find yourself at a white tie event in the Deep South, held at a restored plantation, where all the guests are wealthy white folks and all the servers are young black men in livery–you may need to check yourself for a second.

The modern South is the product of a lot of melding of many different cultures, many of which are often forgotten or deliberately ignored, I wouldn’t want to say any one ethnic or racial group “owns” the legacy of Southern culture.

56

Well yeah. Being annoyed and asking someone to move is a universal thing. But you can be polite about it, or you can be brusque about it. Southerners tend to work with the first, not the second.

I am reminded of a friend of my mother’s who is originally from Pittsburgh, and she seemed SO awful to me for a long time, because she was very direct and brusque. She wasn’t necessarily rude, but she wasn’t polite either. Eventually I realized it was just the way she was; she wasn’t intentionally bucking the social norms or trying to be rude or impolite, and she was probably perfectly nice in Pittsburgh.

That’s why I said “a certain public politeness”- I mean that it’s a way of interacting that is polite, even when it’s not necessarily so nice. Kind of like Churchill’s quote about killing and being polite.

57

I never reviewed the 1619 project because I’d spent the previous year reading a lot of source material behind it. So just now I looked up the curriculum summary and I don’t see anything that would convince a KKK member to switch allegiances. They already have their stories, with their heroes, and there are no celebrated heroes in the 1619 project (other than the journalists and scholars who put it together).

Most of 1619 is myth-busting. A corrective, rather than a full replacement. A very necessary task, but it de-valorizes all our Founding Fathers and revered institutions (including capitalism, law enforcement, and the courts) without proposing anything new to admire or emulate.

It basically says, this country was founded on garbage, on lies, on violence, on greed, on cruelty. Which is an inconvenient truth. I accept that it is the truth but now what? It’s not very hopeful. People need something positive, a vision, to move towards.

58

I read everything the 1619 Project put out, I think a lot of it was well written and thought provoking, but I also think several of its conclusions were contrary to fairly well known historical reality, and it made some fairly sweeping assumptions to come up with some of its claims.

I don’t think it makes it a bad project, but I do think it should be held up as the work of professional historians. If it’s viewed as a mostly-accurate think piece to make you reanalyze potentially distorted views you have of America’s founding centuries, it’s good. But I think it isn’t great as an actual historical work.

59

I’m curious if you could elaborate. Might be too much for a discussion thread here. After slogging through several long winded books on the subject it’s hard to know whom to believe. I can’t fact check every assertion in a 400 page history book, or examine the motives of the author.

Did you meant to say “I do NOT think…” here?

60

Yeah, typo–I meant to say “do not think it should be held up as the work of professional historians.”

I actually was like 95% sure we’d discussed the 1619 Project some time ago and I had made my points there, but I was unable to find it in a search so maybe I imagined it–without getting too into the weeds in this thread, one of the big issues I took with it was the claim made that slavery and the defense of slavery was a significant motivation, you could even say they suggest it was the motivation for our Revolution against British rule. I do not believe that is supported by the history–and fairly respected historians like Sean Wilentz of Princeton, have frankly made the points far better than I could:

Historians Clash With the 1619 Project - The Atlantic

Sean Wilentz: A Matter of Facts - The Atlantic