dropzone: * There really CAN’T be a pleasant discussion of why and how much Northerners and Southerners dislike each other without it being Godwinized by slavery. *
Now now, that’s not what I was doing. I didn’t interfere at all with the little “redneck bastards”/“Yankee scum” lovefest that you guys had going there. I don’t care if Northerners and Southerners like to swap insults about their respective cultures and achievements; if you like that sort of thing, that’s your business. Nor did I criticize or insult the modern South for having had slavery in its history (as others have pointed out, the North had slavery in its earlier history as well).
But what gets to me, as I said, is when Northerners make jokes to the effect that it would be alright with them if the slaveholding states had seceded. Because that is essentially saying that you think that your having to put up with sharing a country with those pesky Southerners is worse than black people’s having to put up with who-knows-how-many-more generations of slavery in the Confederate South.
Yes, I know it’s just a joke. See, what I’m saying is, it isn’t funny.
I don’t call too many statements on these boards flat out crazy, but I’ll call that about your nutso suggestion that Jum Crow was in way worse than slavery. What about Jim Crow would be worse for former slaves than selling children or spouses off, or any number of other things you can casually do with your own property, including destroy it?
But say we accept your statement about Jim Crow being worse in some ways. Then you go on to talk about how wrong it is to be blamed for the sins of your ancestors. Combining those two things is an extremely bad arguement to defend Southern culrure, IMO, because Jim Crow was still up and running in the 1960s. and even into the 1970s IIRC they were still in courts battling over the last vestiges of it. What does that mean? That YOU, if you’re a white southernor, or your mom & dad (maybe your grandparents if you’re still very young), were the bastions of Jim Crow. Or if not your families, most of the white families around you. The South comes off a whole lot worse than the north by your logic.
But I don’t want to get into some kind of “Where is the racism worst” debate, because I’ve never lived in the south, and I’ve seen more of it than I’ve ever wished to in the north.
You said yourself, she’s not southern. Who knows what she “understood” from this? Maybe she “understood” that she pissed a few of you off, and others were afraid to back HER up because they aren’t honest enough, or bold enough. Whatever she understands about your culture, she probably undertands it as well as she does Japanese Bushido.
You were afraid of a more fiery confrontation? There was NO confrontation. May I remind you of the SDMB’s motto – Fighting Ignorance (not ignoring it) Since 1973. Maybe if she’s been confronted with the implications of her words, she would have backed away from them because maybe she’s not quite the the racist she seems. You don’t have to confront her by calling her a racists harpy, you know. You can ask her to explain herself, and you can explain to her how you took her comment, and just maybe achieve a little better mutual understanding.
Or maybe not, and Christ, we can’t risk a blown line in the community college play as the cost of battling racism now, can we?
I just get a perverse glee whenever anyone says something to the effect of “white southerners are prejudiced against other people.” The irony seems to be lost on so many people.
Having the southern states is good for the rest of the country, because it lets them believe that all of the racism and bigotry in the country is all conveniently gathered together in one area so that it can be shunned. So I can move out to San Francisco, for example, and have someone tell me, “You’re from Georgia? You must be racist.” and then not five minutes later make some commment about how Asian people just can’t drive.
I like the way Roy Blount Jr. described it – he said that as a white, Christian, male, American, from Georgia, he was about as politically incorrect as a person can be. (I used to be able to claim that honor as well, until I had to go and come out of the closet, dammit.)
I’m not from the South, although I was born and raised in a nominally “red state”, lived in rural Virginia for six months, and am strictly Appalachian on my father’s side.
Well, the fact that under slavery blacks had financial value and weren’t nearly as likely to be killed for one (see “Emmett Till”, “Marion Stembridge”, “James Chaney”, etc.). Personally I find the threat of being killed in cold blood (sometimes following days of torture) and your family seeing the killers walk out of the courtroom grinning as at least as demeaning as the auction block.
How the fuck do you know what my mom, dad and grandparents were or weren’t? Or for that matter, how do you know all of my grandparents were white?
I will speak for all of my ancestors (who happened to be of at least three races) however when I say, quite ungrammatically, “fuck y’all”.
I also said
Which would imply to those with reading comprehension skills that she has lived here for well over two decades. If she hasn’t picked up on the culture by now I don’t think that beating her over the head in a greenroom is going to get the trick done.
If you’re indicative of northern liberal mentality, then maybe it’s as well Bush won.
What on Earth would possibly have been achieved by calling to task one racist old woman whose words are being ignored anyway? Had there been black people present then there probably would have been words exchanged by both whites and blacks, but there weren’t. It died in that room. She is of no consequence politically and I cannot imagine anybody who heeds her words who is not but buttressing a bigotry they already had. To quote Heinlein,
As for your opinions on college plays, see “Y’all, fucking of” above.
Obviously, you are confusing the electoral vote with the popular vote. Further, you demonstrated at least two isms. And what’s this we business? I’ll bet you don’t know the secret handshake.
Well, it was for a while the home of The White House of the Confederacy. That’s pretty Southern.
Jim (may I call you Jim?), this paragraph alone clearly indicates that you are not from the South. You just don’t seem to understand that we really do do things differently down here. The cold shoulder is probably the most dreaded punishment available. We are (by and large) a social people. We know spouse’s names (and probably birthdays), we know kid’s names (and probably pet’s names and birthdays), we have either friends or family in common (nine times out of ten). It’s a rare conversation that doesn’t involve reference to an aunt who recently did something eccentric (like getting photographed in a Jeff Gordon shirt, bless her heart) or to a grandma who had a health problem or to a cousin who got married. To be given the cold shoulder to is to be left adrift in a cruel harsh world without any basis of support. I would rather be yelled at. Yelling indicates that your infraction was relatively minor and that you are not considered irredeemable. The cold shoulder means you have committed the social equivalent of a mortal sin and must be made to suffer before any redemption is possible. It’s a Bad Thing and done properly, quite unmistakable. To have rubbed her nose in it after the cold shoulder would just be crass.
I’ve been here for four and a half years and in that time have I ever managed to be funny?
Jeezily fuck, Kimstu! Can’t a guy express his frustration with the population of a region without the PC cops popping in to point to the elephant in the room THAT EVERYBODY ALREADY KNOWS ABOUT BUT HAVE CHOSEN NOT TO INCLUDE IN THE CONVERSATION? My first clue to you is free but subsequent ones will cost a quarter: EVERYBODY HERE KNOWS SLAVERY WAS BAD AND IS REAL PLEASED IT IS GONE. We didn’t need you to belabor the obvious.
(patting Zoe on the hand) That’s a dear! You just keep thinking the rest of the South is as good as Virginia.
Crap, I’m channeling Miz Eulalie!
People have moved around in this nation so much, I wonder if any region can claim a heritage that’s completely Southern or completely Californian for that matter. Our professional sports teams will play for a certain city or a certain region, but I wonder how many of the players are actually from the area their team represents.
There are racist jerks in every part of the country, and I wonder if they aren’t like a nation unto themselves? Take a poll of the local racist jerks in your area, and of course you’ll find some that are home-grown and others that are relative newcomers. People in various regions of the country must shed their “holier-than-thou” attitudes when it comes to this matter and see that no one region or city has a monopoly on racist attitudes, for many people are too close to the problem in their own areas, and because of that, their own racist creeps may seem less noticable than those from other parts of the country.
Be wary of the racist garbage you hear from other parts of the country, for that one loudmouth you hear might actually come from your own hometown.
One of the moments that I am proudest to remember is that Andy Young is the man who taught me to sing a song that I had never heard before: We Shall Overcome.. I was a teenager and he was maybe ten years older and a minister. We were in a church camp together.
And I would add to your list Edward R. Murrow. I think he was from Greensboro, North Carolina. He’s another of my heroes.
What is it that is non-Southern about Key West? The fast pace of life? It is probably more Southern in its attitude that areas of southern Florida’s mainland. And New Orleans is certainly Southern. The French and Spanish influences of the region are part of our history.
Although some folks around Houston might disagree with you, I’ve never particularly thought that Dr. Pepper, beef barbecue or chicken-fried steak define the South. It’s much more elusive and it’s not at all that ugly, ignorant, vile thing that some wish to ascribe to it.
As Lib knows, it’s not for everybody. And not every place in the South is worthwhile. But we’re far from being the kind of people that Boyo described.
And the nation’s as well.
Everyone in the South knows the true meaning of that expression when it is spoken to another adult. It is not a pleasantry.
Got to agree there. A well placed shocked silence does a darn sight more than an “I cannot BELIEVE what you just said” 'round these parts. In this mentality, it isn’t a case of being cowardly or not wanting to cause a scene, really. It isn’t even necessarily a case of “Well, s/he’s old so their opinions aren’t going to change.” It’s as you say.
I’d talk more about how fucking sick I am of Southerners being automatically listed in the ‘Moron’ category, but I’m sleepy.
Oh, I adore Virginia! That’s one of the reasons I wasn’t going to give it up without a fight! That is one state that has its priorities in order. But if you get a chance, be sure to visit Charleston and Savannah too. They are pretty enough to have been in Virginia.
(Ten generations back, my grandfather was in the House of Burgesses, 100 years before Washington. Every old family I know came from Virginia to N.C. to Tennessee.)
Now quit patting my head or I will hit you in the shins with my cane.
Zoe, good madam of the FFV*, I bow to your inate social superiority.
Me too. But I have the benefit of living in both the Southern and Jim’s cultures so I know why he has some difficulty with it. Up here we are of a very mobile culture, both socially and, especially important for this discussion, physically. We do not have the social and familial bonds you have down South and, as people usually do not share a common ethnic culture, either, commonality is reached by everybody explaining their positions. We cannot assume everybody shares or even knows our views so we have to explain them. One of the few things the people who settled the Upper Midwest shared was that they were of a rather socialist bent and you know how THEY have to explain everything. Twenty or thirty times. And how they have made a virue of telling people when they are wrong, how they are wrong, and the steps necessary to make it right.
However, after many years in the crucible of Southern society the woman in the OP would definitely know that she had committed a major faux pas and deserved shunning.
For the rest of you, the First Families of Virginia.
Are you just BAITING me to sing showtunes from 1776?
As for Key West- since I’ve never been there I can’t speak for its southernness (basically, if Jimmy Buffett [who lives there] says it’s southern, I’ll accept his judgment), but most of southern Florida isn’t accepted as culturally southern because
1- it was very sparsely populated during most of the “defining” periods of the south (which yes, do include the slavery period and Civil War)
2- more of the current population is not of the Franco/British stock that populates most of the south but relocated northerners, Cubans, Haitians and other recent immigrants (while Orlando has been a city for more than 150 years, for example, perhaps 1% of its current inhabitants lived there or had families who lived there before Disneyworld)
3- so much of Southern Florida is architecturally and commercially homogenized (chain-stores, strip malls, chain motels, etc.) that there just isn’t much “there there” (which, I know, was said of Oakland by Gertrude Stein, not of a southern point)
To me the defining points that make a place Southern are:
1- architecture and habitation predating the Civil War
2- a significant black population
3- local evidence of agrarian Indian tribes
4- southern manners and mores
5- cuisine (i.e. Chicken Fried Chicken [I’ve never understood that term] & New Orleans Platter at Applebees doesn’t count- I’m talking of "what is served in the homes and the little cinder block mom & pop restaurants that cater to locals?)
6- substantial agriculture on family farms in the surrounding countryside
7- the HEAT
8- a general sense of community based on these things
By these qualifiers the south includes parts of Texas, northern Florida, parts of Missouri, Maryland and Kentucky, and excludes the newer regions and even some places like Birmingham (a late 19th century industrial city that happens to be in Alabama). Virginia is definitely southern, but it’s more Virginia than it is anything else (in part because of its size and its antiquity) just as New Orleans, while tangentially southern, is mostly New Orleans- there is no other place on Earth quite like it (and I mean that in the best possible way).
I’m not totally nostalgic or rose colored glasses about the South- there are things here that drive me nuts (the Confederate flag and or evolution always being issues on some state’s docket, for example), but generally I do think it’s an area overrepresented in the arts and in Americans of achievement and in many ways a more tolerant and accepting place than most people who have never lived here realize. (Many of the blacks who left the south for northern industrial cities, for example, actually came back because they felt the racial climate was better down here; some of the older black people I grew up around stated “down here, you knew what parts of town and what restaurants you couldn’t go into… up there you gotta guess” and “down here they hate us as a race and love us as people, up there they love us as a race and hate us as people”; of course I’ve also known a tattooed Holocaust survivor who is still adamantly defensive of German culture as the finest the world has ever produced.)
Most of the old Virginia families I know of (including my own - we got here in 1640 or so and have lived within a couple miles of our first homestead ever since) don’t look back with rose colored glasses, either. We have a special regard for the history of this place because we’ve been a part of it for so long - it is hard not to have an affinity for a place that has a connection to your family that spans not decades, but centuries.
Are there things about Southern history that are embarassing and reprehensible? Absolutely. Slavery, Massive Resistance, Bull Connor, and more besides. There are also wonderful things about our history and culture that are worth celebrating and proclaiming. Go to Monticello on a crisp fall morning. Go to St. John’s Church and listen to a re-enactment of Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!” speech. Beale Street on a Saturday night. Lay in a hammock one summer afternoon and read some Eudora Welty. Shag to some beach music (sorry British dopers, but the shag is a dance over here, not what you guys think). All of those things are distinctly and uniquely Southern. We can, and do, lay rightful claim to them.
As more and more of the United States becomes homogenized and fewer and fewer places can actually be called “places,” I become more and more thankful that I live in a region that has such a distinct identity. I certainly wish that people were more thoughtful, and less quick to latch onto the typical depictions, but I also recognize that those depictions are only a miniscule part of a much richer place.
No, we don’t all pine for past. Some of us appreciate it, study it, and try to learn from it. But nearly everyone I know of is much too concerned to be trying to make the future a better place than to spend too much time bemoaning what happened in April 1865.
And yes, both my grandmothers could say “Well, bless your heart” that would leave the recipient with a very, very clear message about what their feelings were. Both were genteel the bone and both were as tough as old shoe leather.
I would like to defend the shocked silence rather than a loud confronting, from a Southern Point of View.
A collective shocked silence and averting of the eyes is shaming. Extremely shaming, to those in the South. It indicates that you have commited an offense to terrible too speak of, it indicates that you have brought the displeasure of a group upon your head, it means that you will not be welcome (or at the very least, shunned) in polite society until which time you have made your amends by action and word. This sometimes takes YEARS.
This method does not allow for hasty, non-genuine apologies. It does not allow you to try to make excuses or defend yourself as a collective confrontation would. It also does not allow one to argue “that’s not what I meant” and does not give the one shunned the right to feel their statement justified because someone was yelling at them.
When one is given the cold shoulder, it makes the recipient actually think about the wrongness of their actions.
When I was a kid and did something wrong, it was far worse to have the parents treat you as a pariah rather than to be yelled at. Yelling, I can get over, but the cold shoulder was something that stayed with you a very long time. As stated, it makes you think about what you did, said etc…
Now, more than likely, some kind soul will take this woman aside, and gently point out her error. At this point, the poor misguided woman will have done enough self-scourging that she will see the error of her ways and work twice as hard to eradicate that unpleasantness from her personal history.
Actually, I’m of the belief that coldly shunning the speaker is the best response. Actually arguing about it tends to get their hackles up, and some people really seem to experience joy in playing the victim of multicultural society. So I deny them that pleasure; part of being involved in civil society, in my opinion, is not being racist. Losing the privilege of involvement in society seems like exactly the right response to racism.
