Have pride in things you have some control over and have improved. Don’t have pride where you don’t have responsibility.
This thread seems to be a continuation of a discussion we were having in the Pit. So rather than re-type all my comments there, I’ll just link the thread.
Southern pride goes back to the Civil War. We were kicking some ass for the first 2 1/2 years of a war that the North thought would take less than a month. Lee and Jackson made the northern generals look like fools. He made his big mistake at Gettysburg and it went downhill from that.
But we almost won. I was at Gettysburg five years ago and stood at the high water mark. Damn, we were close to defeating tyranny.
Any of you libs that now complain about G.W. Bush, the battle against tyranny was lost in 1863 in PA. It just took this long for the inevitable to play out.
So, hell yeah, we are proud and should be. You couldn’t beat us one on one. It took the overwhelming resources you had to grind us down…
“We”? Okay, then. “You” owned slaves, destroyed lives, tortured and raped and mutilated and crushed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and you have the effrontery to talk about tyranny.
You have to admit though that the Reconstruction was brutal, corrupt, unjust, and did not help anyone except certain northern commercial opportunists. Setting aside the very different rationales between the two, I personally see very relevant parallels between the Southern Reconstruction and the Iraq Occupation.
People in most of the original colonies including the Northern ones owned slaves too. It just ended earlier for ownership and later for slave trading. Boston and Newport, RI were huge slave trading distribution centers in the later years for example. We usually blame the manufacturers and distributors for bad products rather than the end consumers but it is almost never viewed that way for slavery. Ships pulling into Boston sent slaves south for the highest bidder like no tomorrow.
The South owned more slaves for longer but I cannot fathom why people assume that the only slave states were in the South. Maryland was a slave during the Civil War. Why is it reprehesible for some agricultural states to hold on to slavery longer than states like New York or New Hampshire who enjoyed the practice for a long time themselves? To use a common cliche, that is “the pot calling the kettle black”. We won’t even get into indentured servitude which is Northern slavery by a nicer name.
The North owned plenty of slaves of their own over time but slaves are best used for agriculture which wasn’t as abundant in the North. I get tired of American history ignoring the idea that the Northern states didn’t have slavery themselves.
Because they abolished slavery on their own, and didn’t go to war to try and preserve the practice.
In the first year of the war, the American government was acting under a misapprehension - they believed that the southern secession was mainly carried out by a vocal minority in the south and the majority of people in the seceding states were at worst neutral on the subject. So they hoped that political means could be brought to bear, the secessionists would lose power, unionists would take over, and the southern states would peacefully rejoin the United States.
I have lived in the South all of my life, and I can honestly say don’t know the answer to the OP.
But as you keep saying as if it’s supposed to mean something to anyone else, YOUR family has been here for 400 years. Mine hasn’t. Mine came over after the Civil War, fleeing some sort of military service, if I remember correctly.
ETA: Whoops, I didn’t even see this gem on my first read.
Because it was reprehensible for anyone to own slaves. The longer the practice went on, the more reprehensible it was. That sort of attempted tu quoque about something so disgusting is ludicrous. Even if the north looks nearly as bad, the south still looks vile and repulsive.
Well NYC does take a lot of abuse, just different from the South.
NJ gets a lot of abuse about crowding, the smells along the NJ turnpike and mafia jokes. (Which BTW, as a NJ Italian born in the Bronx, means I get defensive quickly on this board. I also get tired of the Vocal Southern Priders on this board that make sweeping statements about the rudeness of New Yorkers. )
California also gets a lot of abuse.
The broad brush applied to any of these groups is silly and maybe the difference between North Easterners and Californians versus Southern Priders is that we never claim our shit don’t stink, we just think the benefits of living where we do, out weigh the negatives. We have some Southerners that like to gloss over the warts of the south. Worse yet, we have all run into the idiots not on this board who still think, “The south will rise again!”
Have you ever noticed how often the more noticeable posters from NY, NJ and California will make fun of their home state/city as much as they praise it?
Shagnasty: These weak defenses of the South’s attempt to preserve slavery for a few more decades is why Southerners continue to get abuse for the sins of the past. It was wrong, the south was wrong, the rich slave owners somehow convinced the poor non-slave holding southerners to help preserve their evil and corrupt institution. Give it up. You know it was wrong, defenses of “others held slaves in the past”, don’t measure up to the fact that the South fought to preserve it. NJ & Maryland are two states where it lasted nearly as long, but nearly no one fought to preserve it or pretended the civil war was about states rights.
The civil war ended 140 years ago and yet the lynchings lasted into the 1960s.
Jim
First of all, what’s this “we” shit? (Which, of course, goes to the root of **jsgoddess’s ** question.) Secondly, does it bother you *at all * that your heroes were fighting for the “right” to own other human beings?
I have no generalized opinion of “southerners” any more than I have a generalized opinion of “northeners”. People is people, mostly. I do, however, have an opinion of confederate flag-wavers, and it’s that they are, at best, ig’nint yokels.
Count me as another who wouldn’t describe as ‘pride’ the feelings I have about the random tenets of my culture (I’m from West Virginia). I embrace them wholeheartedly. But, as the late Bill Hicks said in response to people asking him if he was proud to be an American: “I didn’t have much to do with that… My parents happened to fuck there”.
I always get the feeling that people expressing such pride overtly are doing so in response to real or perceived slights to their culture. Like the south, West Virginia has long been the butt of such slights, but I rarely feel personally insulted when people make jokes about teethbrushes and family trees that don’t fork.
I worked once with a guy named Bill, a 200%-proof southerner from the Florida panhandle, or, as he called it, ‘Lower Alabama’. At lunch one day, I quoted the Bennett Cerf story about a restaurant that had a sign reading, “Pies like mother used to make, fifty cents. Pies like she thought she used to make, two dollars”. Bill turned downright steely when he opined that that restaurant wouldn’t have lasted long where he came from. His pride was apparently very easy to wound.
One thing can always identify a Southerner: A Southerner knows the difference between a Yankee and a Damn Yankee but is usually too polite to explain.
Well, do you mean “we” as “your family” or “we” as in “people from Ohio”?
Maybe it needs to be parsed on a comparative level. For example, what would Ohioans say about Michiganders?
I’ll admit that, but it does gin up some conversation.
True, but seldom in the same breath. They’ve got a way of almost taking the negatives as positives, or at least glossing over the essential contradiction.
Speaking as someone with no experience of anything Southern (except for Popeye’s chicken), one at least partial explanation I’d always heard was that the South was traumatized by losing the Civil War. It can’t ever revenge itself or the permanent black mark on history, so it creates the “Lost Cause” movement in an attempt to heal itself. Southern pride was therefore at least in part a defensive reaction, a “bloodied but not beaten” mark of respect.
Aside from that, put me in with the “Don’t get regional pride” crowd. Important historical things happened where you are? They’ve happened everywhere. I’m from PA. I don’t give a crap about Gettysburg or the Amish (though they do make good pretzels).
Quite right, An Gadaí. I’ll add that had I been born 60 years before, I’d have been happy if my parents were rich enough to send me to high school, and even if I had been able to do advanced studies, I’d probably have had to work in a language not my own – in my own country – making much less money than my colleagues in other parts of the country. But this won’t be the case because we took matters in our own hands starting in the 50s and 60s (see for example the Quiet Revolution). Now I know this isn’t something I am personally responsible for, but by God we did it and I think we can be proud for that.
To be honest, I can understand very well what the Southerners in this thread are talking about. Some have said that the stereotype of Southerners in the rest of the US as racist, drunk, violent and stupid has caused them to feel a bit like outsiders and helped them develop their current sense of identity. Well, I’ve been told more than once (on this board, for example) that my people is racist, and clearly “French-Canadians” are still stereotyped as drunken, lazy simple rural folk and not, for example, university professors. So I get that. As for the Civil War, which Southerners are often accused of still fighting in their heads, sure it was fought to preserve a loathsome institution, but it led to Reconstruction and assorted loss of freedom for the South and caused decades of resentment. Quebecers are accused of still fighting in their heads the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, which while possibly not so important in the grand scheme of things is a symbol of us being basically “colonized” for 200 years.
And I know that in the 30s our Catholic Church and many of our opinion leaders openly supported fascistic or otherwise far-right regimes in Europe. I’m not proud of this, or of the other negative things in our history, but – like slavery in the American South – they’re part of the package and don’t cancel the good things. And it’s important to know them because if we don’t know history, we’re bound to repeat it.
I think it’s in large part because much of this board’s members are liberal white Americans. If you’re an Irishman, or a Quebecer, or a black American, having national pride doesn’t seem so dangerous because in some ways you’re a “minority” and your pride often is a celebration of having attained – or fighting for – equality. But if you’re a white American, you are the most powerful culture in the world, so “pride” often looks like jingoism. And in a time where the US government is fighting this war in Iraq, “national pride” gets tied with these people who call for nuking the Middle East, and also with the idea that we’re invading countries to impose our values on them.
But this isn’t to say Americans don’t have reasons to be proud; they’re the richest country on the world, one of the longest continuously existing democracies, and even though they have many evils in their past (including, yes, slavery), they’ve always struggled to improve themselves. So God bless America, and God bless the South!
That’s the problem right there - assuming that white Americans are automatically on top of the heap. They’re not. I have said this a million times in debates on this forum, and the vast majority of the time my posts get drowned by others and completely ignored. Every now and then someone else will acknowledge what I’ve said, so maybe that will happen here. So here it is:
The real American divide is ECONOMIC, not racial.
If you are a dirt poor white American, you’re not “the most powerful culture in the world.” You’re just a dirt poor white American. I see that nobody responded to my post about the Scots-Irish, so I’m going to assume that not many people bothered to read it. If you had, you’d realize that there are different kinds of “white Americans.” Plenty of white Americans were slaves in America. Yes, white slaves. I know that’s a difficult concept for people to understand but yes, America practiced white slavery. They just call it “indentured servitude” in the history books. These people were worked to death, raped, tortured, beaten, and covered by the dust of history. Not just in America either, but in Barbados and other tropical colonies (where most of them shit themselves to death from dysentery.) The majority of these white slaves were Irish or Scots-Irish.
Were these people “the most powerful culture in the world?”
Is some dirt poor farmer in the South whose farm was just foreclosed on and who has to go on welfare “the most powerful culture in the world?”
Is a machinist whose spine is permanently crooked from hunching over the same machine every day for eight hours, and then loses his job because his factory closed down and moved production to Mexico, “the most powerful culture in the world?”
THE REDNECK MANIFESTO by Jim Goad. Seriously. Read it. It completely changed my perspective on American class and race relations.
As another Doper whose Euro-Southern roots date back to the early days of Jamestown and who has American Indian and probably African ancestry besides, and who having grown up gay and intelligent on a farm 20 miles from a Podunk town in rural Alabama (and as such is no great fan of the usually uninformed and hypocritical “traditional values” crowd), and as a descendant of numerous Confederate veterans (some of whom came from families that didn’t own their own land and some of whom came from families that owned many slaves) I’ll take a brief retirement from my self-imposed SDMB retirement long enough to give this a try.
In the first place, there’s really not as much veneration of the Civil War as non southerners might think. You rarely hear it mentioned and, as with Wilford Brimley, those de rigeur statues of men holding muskets in town squares are many years removed from their erection. It’s really not a subject of daily conversation.
That said, it is a lot more recent than you may think. The Civil War is still in living memory if living memory is defined as (and by some historians it is) “what the oldest generation still alive in large numbers can remember hearing first hand when they were young of the experiences of the oldest generation still alive in large numbers at that time”. In other words, the oldest generation still alive in large numbers in the south/American in general would be Brokaw’s “greatest generation”- those who were young adults in WW2 (so, let’s say, those born about 1920). When they were young, the oldest generation would have been those born around the 1840s/1850s- a few Civil War veterans and a lot more civilians who remembered the war and the Reconstruction. In another few years the Civil War will be outside of living memory and it will be interesting to see what affect that has on the “already far more homogenized [and not always for the better] due to franchises and mass media/pop culture than many would suspect” South.
That ‘that’ said, I’m 41 years old: I was born after the JFK assassination and have no memory of MLK or RFK and grew up with color television in a central AC house, and yet as “recent” as I am, my parents’ wedding in 1952 was attended by two former slaveowners (my mother’s step great-grandmother/biological great-aunt and her sister, both of them born in the 1850s and both of whom inherited slaves when their father died in 1861). While I have no memory of the event, when I was a baby my parents put me on the lap of my great-grandmother Louisiana’s friend ‘Aunt Maudie’, about 102 years old and born under slavery, strictly so that I could say “I was held in the lap of an ex-slave” (my parents were both majorly into tradition/history/connections, and yes- b.i.o.n., white people really did have black friends in the 1960s (and 1860s, and 1760s, and 1660s- the fact that the races were not equal under the law did not prevent affections from forming, and as I’ve said many times there’s nothing remotely simple about race relations in the south today or at any time in the past- on the individual level all bets are and have always been off= I grew up hearing fascinating stories about the friendships and romantic entanglements twixt the races in my family alone, my favorite being that of a one-legged Civil War veteran uncle and how he avenged the rape of his biracial daughter).
So, I am proud to be a Southerner if “pride” is defined as “having no shame in, but having a strong interest in and a real sense of connection to” the place and its culture, much the way I have gay pride. That said, I detest the oversimplification of large groups of people (even though I’ll admit I say Yankees & Fundies) and of history in general. This extends to those who wave the Confederate battle flag and seem to have no clue that
1- It’s not even the frigging Confederate flag
2- It’s a flag that was popularized far more by the (nationwide) revenant KKK movement of the 20th century than the Civil War
However, one need look no further than this thread to see that, like slavery, the South holds no monopoly on mythmaking or painting with mile wide brushes. (And as always I’m appalled by how people who would probably go apeshit over someone painting all Muslims/all black people/all gays/all Christians/all atheists with the same mile wide brush think nothing of using one to slap on a few paints to all Alabamians or all southerners as if we were all of exactly the same mindset; Alabama’s the most biodiverse state in the nation in terms of flora and fauna and its people aren’t that much more homogenous.)
It should be remembered, for example, that “my fellow Alabamian” George Wallace (a man my father knew well and who I dined with* [his niece was my 6th/7th grade “girlfriend]) had massive support outside the south even as early as 1964, a year after the Birmingham church bombing that killed 4 little girls (one of them the best friend of “my fellow Alabamian”, then 9 year old Condoleezza Rice). In 1972, the year he was shot, he won the Michigan primary by 51% and had enough support from California to the “liberal” northeast to cause both Nixon and McGovern to view him with real concern, and while he was famously heckled at Harvard but received standing ovations at speeches everywhere else he went including northern states
At the same time, there was a very sizeable contingency in his home state who despised him, one that included my parents (my father was a Wallace appointee at one time, my mother was friends with his first wife Lurleen, and both of my parents taught his children and stepchildren). With my parents as with many of his detractors their dislike of him was not racially based (frankly he was far better than the alternatives- he at least knew that the racist rhetoric he was spewing for the camera was bullshit and was in fact a racial moderate**) but because he was such a “give ‘em what they want to hear” populist who, as you regrettably have to if you want to be elected, appealed to the lowest common denominator for their votes. It’s also worth remembering that Wallace continued to be elected, often by landslides, long after blacks received the vote, and the black vote in Alabama was always overwhelmingly for Wallace. He was no more evil than any populist and probably less evil than many.
As for That Damned War®©™, I won’t rehash what others have stated and what I’ve said many times before ***in- Og- knows- how- many- other- threads, though I will add a couple of things I don’t remember having mentioned before.
1- The reason most southerners fought in the war was because they didn’t have much of a choice. The Conscription Acts made military service mandatory for all males 18-35 who were not engaged in necessary industries or otherwise able to argue or bribe their way out of it, the high age later increased to 45 (and by the end of the war if you were 9 or if you were 89 and could pull a trigger they’d accept you as a volunteer- they were even inducting slaves into the army).
2- I have no problem conceding that the war was begun by Southern plutocrats to preserve slavery; the evidence is overwhelming and incontrovertible. I am irked, however, by those who believe the war on the Union’s part was fought to end slavery; it quite simply was NOT, at least not in the beginning. Lincoln clearly stated that he had no intention of proclaiming emancipation but only to preserve the Union (it’s one of history’s ironies that by starting the war the Southern plutocrats ended the practice sooner than it probably would have died without the war) and that the North was no more monolithic than the South. There were abolitionists and anti-secessionists who served as generals in the Confederate army and there was no shortage of anti-War sentiment (and sure as hell no shortage of racial hatred) in the North.
As for Civil Rights, Rosa Parks was from Alabama and Martin Luther King was from Georgia and assassinated in Tennessee. From the same era, Eldridge Cleaver left the south when he was a baby and his family never moved back, and Malcolm X was born in Omaha, assassinated in New York City, and never lived south of the Mason Dixon line. More of the worst racial riots in American history happened outside of the south than inside, and while Montgomery, AL had racially segregated schools so did Las Vegas, Chicago, and Hyannisport, Massachusetts. Byron de la Beckwith was a [California born] bastard from Mississippi who murdered Medgar Evers, but the biggest bigoted bastard of the time was J. Edgar Hoover, a native and resident of D.C… In 1939 Hattie McDaniel was prevented from viewing the world premiere of Gone With the Wind due to ridiculous race prejudice in Atlanta, but in 1952 she was denied burial in Hollywood Cemetery for the same reasons (in spite of the fact the cemetery included the graves of mobster Bugsy Siegel, the dogs who played Rin Tin Tin, and one of the chimps from the Tarzan movies) but to far less reportage. The point of all these is that the South does not hold a monopoly on 20th century racism.
I am curious whether those who think it is impossible for southerners to be proud of their heritage without promoting racism would think it is possible for any of the possible to exist:
1- Vietnam veterans who are proud of their service but don’t promote the murder of innocent civilians such as those killed in North Vietnam, Cambodia or the My Lai Massacre
2- People who are proud to be Americans yet don’t support the war in Iraq (or, for that matter, people who are proud to be Americans and fully support the war in Iraq, whichever is the opposite of how you feel about the war)
3- People who are proud to be American but don’t promote the genocide of the American Indians (and who regardless of where they live occupy land that once belonged to some Indian tribe or other)
4- Descendants of veterans of Sherman’s troops who are proud of their ancestry but don’t promote war crimes against civilians (white or black)
5- Black people who have pride in their race but don’t promote the misogynistic or racist lyrics and substance abuse of rappers
6- Gay people who have pride in being gay but don’t promote cannibalizing gay Milwaukeeans or having anonymous rest area sex
These aren’t rhetorical- I’m curious if you think they’re possible when those who take reasonable pride in southern ancestry do so at the detriment of racial responsibility and reason.
*Ever seen a T-bone covered in ketchup? It ain’t pretty.
**If that sounds hard to believe, it’s true and echoed by pretty much every biographer of any background. He is an exercise in the Vonnegutian adage of ‘careful what you pretend to be’- the miniseries about him starring Gary Sinise is mostly predicated on this quite explicable if unpardonable dichotomy.
***That one contains an interesting quote by Alexis de Tocqueville at the bottom.