I really think you have to look at more than Fairfield County and the bad neighborhoods in New Haven and Hartford to understand Connecticut. I live in the Northwest Corner of Connecticut myself and it is mostly white, but black people and Hispanic people are not relegated to being white people’s shoeshine boys. The whole area is economically depressed by departing factories, and everyone feels the brunt of it. There are some areas up here where rich people go to live in $11 million vacation houses, but there are little enclaves of fantasy-land like that in every state.
As you can see from this post, I get reverse-pride for my state – I always feel like I will say where I am from, and people will assume I grew up with a sweater tied around my neck playing golf with bank presidents or something, instead of in a little raised ranch with a dad who worked in a factory and a mom who worked at KMart. They will assume I am a racist, classist, spoiled bratty snob without even asking first, just because of where I live. Therefore, I usually disavow it, and don’t mention where I’m from to people because I know they’ll probably make judgements against me for it.
Apparently one where people use credit cards.
Then again, I grew up in Fairfield County, CT, so usally I just have my black manservant take care of the bills while I drive around in my Volvo, golf with investment bankers or go play in the back yard with my Labrador retriever (which really pisses of the Mexican gardener).
You trust him with money? Look, it’s your business how you do things, but don’t be surprised if you get a drunk servant and thousands of dollars in ATM disbursements at CLUB TETON on your statement in the future.
I’ve checked into - this is a conservative guess - 200 hotels in the United States in the last five years, in 31 different states, from Massachusetts to Hawaii, Florida to Washington. Not a single one of them worked this way. Every one, without exception, wanted a credit card presented upon arrival.
And a key to understanding “Southern pride” actually: when you’re ridiculed and villified as much as Southerners have been, you either have to accept that your detractors are right OR develop a defiant “fuck you!”* attitude and seek things to be proud of and refute the allegations. With the huge Scots Irish/African/Amerindian genealogical backgrounds and historical isolation (not just from the north but even within our own states) there was already clannishness and “us against them” mentality and romanticism of lost causes/suffering to help buttress the “F.U.” approach while our overrepresentation in the arts (music, literature, culinary, etc.) and things which make us unique and sports and history (including if not especially the Civil War) and the like provide source for refutation and evolved from diversions to personal pride.
While I’m not proud of slavery or Jim Crow or the other abominations that the South has provided stage and actors and audience for over the last few centuries, I have to admit that I do find it fascinating. Talking to old southerners, black or white or other, will almost always bring unique perspectives to these events that “aren’t what you read in the books” (unless it’s a well done oral history compilation) and explains much of the Southern Identity (a thing ultimately more real than Southern Pride).
Quick anecdote: A few years ago I was in D.C. and took a cab and the driver was an elderly black man. He asked where I was from and I told him Alabama, and he told me “Oh yeah? Me too! I grew up in Evergreen…” (a small town about an hour south of Montgomery). “I grew up in the 1950s.” I was expecting a (fact based) philippic about the area and the era and instead got “As soon as my pensions start I can’t wait to quit this city and get back there.” He admitted things were awful then (except for when they weren’t, just as things were great except for when they weren’t- to borrow a line from PURLIE “It can be great fun being colored in Georgia when there ain’t nobody lookin’”) but that they had changed far beyond what’s usually reported, and that he still considered it home.
That’s true with a lot of black people I’ve known who’ve lived in Philadelphia, Detroit, and elsewhere but returned: warts and all (and there’s no shortage of warts or all), the South is home to them and the place that they like best.
Of course I once knew an old Jewish woman whose family refugeed around the time of Krystallnacht and she still considered herself proudly German first and foremost and still viewed German culture as the most advanced in the world. Having never been to Ireland or known that many of its natives, I’m guessing that they can relate as well.
It should be obvious but I’ll disclaim just in case- that’s a general “fuck you” and not directed at anybody in particular in this thread or otherwise.
The problem was that it developed into a viscious circle. When people in other parts of the country villified the ugly parts of southern history (slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow laws) many southerners would defy this attitude by defending them. And by doing this, southerners became defined by the worst parts of their culture.
An apt comparison might be to the way Native Americans have been treated in the United States. They were generally mistreated in every way possible. Most Americans when confronted about our history with Native Americans are willing to concede that what we did was wrong and try to change the subject to something we’re more proud of. We don’t try to defy our detractors and defend what we did. We don’t celebrate the Trail of Tears or Bear River or Sand Creek.
I have a black coworker who was raised between Alabama and Boston. He is a pretty smart guy. He was an officer in the army and is now a systems analyst on my team. He is always plotting how he can get out, out, out of Boston and back to Alabama or at least Atlanta. It is fun to hear his musings about it.
Actually I doubt most Americans give it much thought one way or another and, understandably, feel no real connection to the crimes against the Indians as there’s a difference in a national and regional shame. In the south, it’s more localized and specific. (Of course feeling ashamed of America’s treatment of the Indians is an exercise in futility when done by people who, like me, certainly have no intention of giving back the land we live on to the descendants of its original inhabitants.)
On a completely different note, Drew Gilpin Faust in her newest (and plagued with tiny but aggravating factual errors- she needs to fire her checkers) points out that the 300,000+ southerners who died during the Civil War would be the equivalent of more than 3 million today when you adjust it for the rise in inflation. (Actually it would be more than that if you add in the people who died as a direct consequence of the war- those who died years after the war from complications of a war related injury, for example.) The North actually lost more men than the south, but
1- they had a vastly larger population to help absorb the loss on a social scale (not referring to individual scales- a dead father/husband/son is a dead father/husband/son)
2- those who survived the war did not return to an economically devastated and humiliated homeland where everything had changed
That kind of death toll does many things on the social and psychological levels. For “the widow who reads with eyes that burn that ring upon her hand”* while living in poverty in a world where former slaves are faring better than she is or for the veteran who has nightmares and PTSD (“soldier’s heart” as it was euphemistically called but no less terrifying then than now) that time of horror and suffering and loss has to have a meaning (I’m speaking emotionally, not spiritually or historically or whatever). Nihilism is not a natural state for humans, and neither is depicting oneself as a villain, and thus the father who died of typhoid outside of Chattanooga has to be elevated to a near divine status and thus those tintypes on the mantel become more a lararium than mere mementos and the times in which the person lived and causes for which he died (or for which he suffered if he survived) become noble as well. Otherwise, your irreplaceable loss (be it a person or economic or a place or whatever) is ultimately meaningless/in vain/justifiable even and that’s just not something most people can accept, regardless of how true it may be.
Thomas Jefferson divided all knowledge into two major categories- imagination and memory- and these formed the basis of the [URL=http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9712/images/artarch_1.jpg]bronze doorsURL] of the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. On those doors, Imagination (left) is portrayed as a muse with a lyre, while Memory (right) is portrayed as a widow holding the helmet of her slain husband. I think the two together are the twin helices of the DNA of Southern Pride or at least Southern Identity moreso than in most regions, and the same was true of probably every other culture to lose a major war in history from Ilium to Berlin.
*A line from the Civil War song Stonewall Jackson’s Way
Given the number of southerners who enlist in the U.S. military I’d have to argue that they don’t seem to think of themselves as being the other country.
You’ve stated elsewhere that you feel little sense of patriotism, and apparently you’re not religious either (though I may have misjudged you on that second point). Is there anything that has anything to do with you? Are you simply wrapped up in your own little life with little or no attachment to anything greater than yourself? Would you question black pride or Chicano pride or Jewish pride on the same basis that you question Southern pride? Or are you saying that Southerners, alone of all America’s ethnicities, have no right to take pride in themselves as a people?
But not primarily out of humanitarian reasons. They abolished slavery primarily because it was no longer profitable, and because most northerners did not want blacks living among them. And anyone who claims to see any important moral difference between working a black kid to death in a sugar cane field and working a white kid to death in a coal mine is morally deranged.
Even granting the profit motive, (I have seen several references to Eli Whitney “saving” slavery as only the massive labor requirements that the gin generated could have kept it alive), do you have a citation demonstrating that the motive was not humanitarian or that slavery was abolished in some states based on a desire to not associate with blacks?
